How to find competitors on Instagram: similar accounts, topic search and what your audience follows

Who counts as a competitor

Take a made-up example. Maya bakes custom cakes in Manchester and runs a page with 3,000 followers. Orders come through Instagram, but there were fewer of them over the summer. Maya wants to know where those customers went. Her niche is narrow: custom cakes in one city.

Before searching, settle on the terms. Without them, the list fills with anyone who ever posted a cake. The accounts around your niche fall into three groups.

• Direct. They sell the same thing to the same people. For Maya, that means other Manchester bakers who take custom cake orders.
• Indirect. They meet the same need with a different product. Think of shops with ready-made cakes, bakeries selling pastries and party caterers.
• Attention rivals. They sell nothing in your place, but they take your audience's time. These are baking creators, pastry schools and pages about kids' parties.

People often skip the third group, and that is a mistake. A recipe creator will not take an order, yet Maya's future customers already read that account. An ad placed there reaches exactly the right audience. The list takes all three groups, with a label on every row.

Similar accounts on a profile

The shortest route starts with a page you already know. Instagram builds these recommendations itself and shows them right on someone else's page.

Where to see them

Instagram Help describes it this way. When someone taps Follow on a profile, they see suggestions of similar profiles they might also want to follow. Meta's Transparency Center names two more spots. Suggestions appear under Suggested for You and Discover People in the Following tab, and in the Explore tab.

1. Open the page of the best-known baker in your city.
2. Tap Follow and scroll through the suggested profiles.
3. Write down the handles that fit one of the three groups.
4. Open each find and repeat the steps: its suggestions give you the next round.
5. Stop once no new names appear.

Why everyone sees a different set

Two people open the same page and get different suggestions. Meta's Transparency Center says the system draws candidates from three sources.

• Followers of accounts you already follow.
• Popular accounts in your region.
• Accounts related to topics and products you recently engaged with.

A ranking step then puts the candidates in order. It weighs your public activity, how many accounts you follow and mutual friends with the suggested account. So Maya's suggestions pull in the bakeries she follows herself and people she knows. A colleague in London opening the same page gets another set, because her region is different.

That leads to one rule: collect suggestions from a work account that has followed your niche for a while.

Search by topic, hashtags and place

Suggestions bring you neighbors of accounts you already know. Search surfaces competitors you have never heard of. Meta's Transparency Center lists what search returns: hashtags, places, reels, posts, profiles and audio. You can narrow results to accounts, audio, hashtags or places.

Accounts by the words in their name

For account results, the system compares the words in your query with the username and profile name. That gives a working trick: search with the words a baker would put in a page name. Maya types “custom cakes manchester”, “cake maker manchester” and “bento cake”. The order also reflects connections: the system looks at your social graph and the account owner's.

Hashtags and places

The hashtags tab leads to tag pages. A tag like “manchestercakes” shows who posts such cakes and how they caption them. The places tab helps a local business. A place page gathers posts tagged with that location, so you see who shoots near you.

Our guide to choosing hashtags covers which tags to search. The piece on Instagram location tags explains how places work. Private accounts stay out of reach here. Instagram Help states that posts from a private account appear in search results for no one.

What to throw out

• Roundups and media pages. Pages that repost other people's cakes sell nothing. They belong in the third group, not among direct rivals.
• Silent pages. The last post went up six months ago. That account takes no customers right now.
• Another city. A baker in Leeds will not take an order for a cake delivered in Manchester.
• Accidental matches. A word in the name matched, but the page is about something else. A café with “cake” in its handle sells lunch deals.

What your audience follows

The third route starts from people instead of words. Maya's followers have already chosen whom to read about cakes and parties. Names that repeat across their following lists are attention rivals. This is how you find competitors that neither search nor suggestions showed.

Checking your followers by hand

Open your followers list and pick ten people who look like your customers. Visit each page and open the accounts that person follows. Write down accounts about baking, parties and kids' goods. A handle that shows up for three people out of ten goes into the table. Our guide to seeing who someone follows covers where that list sits and what it shows.

Some pages will not open. Instagram Help is direct: only followers of a private account can see its followers and following lists. On a public account, anyone on Instagram and Threads can see them.

The About this account section

A shortcut sits in About this account. According to Instagram Help, some accounts show an entry called Accounts with shared followers. It lists other public accounts that have the most followers in common. Open it on a known competitor and you get audience neighbors without any manual digging.

Some accounts also show Active ads in the same section. It opens the account's current ads in the Meta Ad Library. Anyone around you who pays for impressions competes for your audience with money as well.

How to build a list of 10 to 20 competitors in an hour

Maya set aside one hour and split it into four blocks of 15 minutes. The order works for any niche. Only the search words change.

1. Minutes 1 to 15: suggestions on the pages of three well-known neighbors, plus one round from each find.
2. Minutes 16 to 30: account search with five queries, one tag page and one place page.
3. Minutes 31 to 45: the following lists of ten followers and About this account on the two largest finds.
4. Minutes 46 to 60: cleanup by the rules from the search section and a group label on every row.

Put every find into the table right away. The template is below, and its rows are made up.

In this example the table holds 17 rows after an hour: 7 direct, 4 indirect and 6 attention rivals. Two direct accounts are private, so Maya set them aside.

Similar accounts for your niche in one check

The related accounts report does the first round for you. It gathers the accounts Instagram considers close to a given profile. You do not sign in to your account or share a password: the handle of a public profile is enough, yours or a neighbor's.

The results show accounts read by the same people who read that page. Each account comes with its follower and post counts. The report marks which ones are private and which are open to checking. The list downloads as a CSV file.

The report does not decide who counts as a rival. It is not a market study and not a list of people taking your customers. You set the group labels, and the report gives you the starting list. Search and your audience's follows stay useful as a cross-check: they add anyone missing from the results.

What to do with the list next

The list shows who is nearby. It does not show what makes them stronger. The next step is to pick five direct accounts and look at them once a week. Our guide to Instagram competitor analysis covers what to compare and in which order.

Keep attention rivals on a separate tab of the table. Ad candidates live among them: creators your customers already read.

The list goes stale. Repeat the collection once a quarter and set the new table next to the old one. New rows show who entered the niche over those three months.

Common questions