Instagram Merchant Profile & Bio-Link Extractor

Extract public Instagram business profiles — followers, engagement, business contact details, and the bio links that are a merchant's actual storefront (Shopee, Tokopedia, WhatsApp, Linktree, own webstore).

For competitor mapping, seller research and lead generation.

No login, no API key. HTTP-only — no browser.

⚠️ This does not scrape an Instagram Shop

If you came here for Instagram Shop products or a product catalog: that data is no longer public. Verified anonymously on 2026-09-01 — /<user>/shop/ and /explore/shop/ redirect to the login page, five major retail accounts carry zero shopping/catalog fields, and there is no product tagging on posts (product_type is only ever clips/igtv, which is the media type). Meta wound Instagram Shopping down.

No amount of scraping technique recovers data a platform stopped publishing, so this actor extracts what genuinely is public — and for a merchant, the bio link is the shop.

Output

{
  "username": "cottonink",
  "fullName": "COTTONINK | Jakarta",
  "biography": "Now Available:\nFall Collection 2026🍂 ...",
  "isVerified": true,
  "followers": 680168,
  "following": 150,
  "postCount": 7483,

  "bioLinks": [
    { "url": "http://linktr.ee/COTTONINK", "title": "Shop Now!",
      "linkType": "external", "platform": "LINK_AGGREGATOR" }
  ],
  "primaryShopLink": "http://linktr.ee/COTTONINK",
  "linkPlatforms": ["LINK_AGGREGATOR"],
  "marketplaces": [],
  "sellsOnMarketplace": false,
  "hasWhatsApp": false,

  "_source": "S2-profile-html"
}

With the API strategy you additionally get business contact and posts:

{
  "isBusinessAccount": true,
  "businessContactMethod": "CALL",
  "businessCity": "Beaverton, Oregon",
  "businessLatitude": 45.5076448,
  "avgEngagementPerPost": 187959.7,
  "engagementRatePercent": 0.0645,
  "recentPosts": [
    { "shortcode": "DctPchKOVcw", "likes": 277530, "comments": 1935,
      "mediaType": "clips", "takenAt": "2026-08-31T13:56:44Z" }
  ]
}

Instagram's l.instagram.com redirect wrapper is unwrapped, so bioLinks carry the real destination, deduplicated, each labelled with the platform a merchant is actually selling on.

Input

{
  "usernames": ["cottonink", "@nike", "https://www.instagram.com/hijup/"],
  "includeRecentPosts": true,
  "delaySeconds": 2
}

Field	Description
usernames	Handles or profile URLs; @ and query strings are handled
includeRecentPosts	Attach recent posts and compute engagement rate
maxPostsPerProfile	Cap attached posts (Instagram returns ~12 anonymously)
delaySeconds	Pause between accounts — pacing keeps a run alive
proxyConfiguration	Residential strongly recommended

Read this before relying on the output

Three strategies, and the richest one is the minority path. The actor tries the JSON API (S1), then the page's embedded JSON (S2), then og meta tags (S3), and records which one produced each row in _source.

In a 3-account test run, 2 of 3 accounts fell through to S2. That matters because:

• businessEmail, businessPhone, businessContactMethod, the business address fields and recentPosts come from S1 only. On S2 rows they are empty — not because the merchant has none, but because that source doesn't carry them.
• S3 rows have rounded counts (680000 rather than 680168) and are tagged _warning: counts_are_rounded_og_values.

Filter on _source if you need guaranteed business contact data.

Instagram throttles anonymous traffic hard, and signals it with a 200 that redirects to a login wall rather than a clean 429. Profiles are therefore fetched sequentially with a delay, and a block rotates both the TLS fingerprint and the proxy session. Without a residential proxy expect login walls after a handful of accounts.

Known limits

• No shop/product/catalog data — see above.
• Business contact and posts only on S1 rows.
• og counts are rounded, and flagged when used.
• engagementRatePercent is computed over the ~12 fetched posts — a recent sample, not a lifetime average.
• Private accounts expose no posts; Instagram CDN media URLs are signed and expire, so download promptly if you need the images.

See CRAWLING_METHOD.md for the full evidence on the missing shop surface, the strategy comparison, and the rate-limit behaviour.