Suggested and similar accounts on Instagram: where they come from and how to remove yourself

Where Instagram shows suggested and similar accounts

Account suggestions show up in four places in the app. Meta, which owns Instagram, explains its ranking systems in its Transparency Center. Its page on account suggestions, called the Meta card below, lists all four. Meta last updated it on March 7, 2025. Section names below match the card.

• Suggested for you. A block of suggestions in the Following tab.
• Discover people. A second set of suggestions in the same tab.
• The Explore tab. Account suggestions appear among the posts there too.
• The moment you follow. You tap Follow on someone's profile, and the app may offer similar pages right away.

How suggested differs from similar

The difference is the starting point. Suggestions in the Following tab are built around you: your follows, your friends and your region. Similar pages are tied to the profile you just followed. That row is still personal. The system pulls its signals from your own connections, so two people on the same page see different sets.

That is the key to reading this list. It is not a ranking of the best pages. It shows how the system reads your connections and interests.

Which signals shape them: what Meta's Transparency Center says

The selection runs in two steps. First the system gathers candidates, then it puts them in order. Meta's Transparency Center covers both steps in its card on suggested accounts.

Where candidates come from

• Followers of accounts you already follow.
• Popular accounts in your region.
• Accounts tied to topics and products you recently showed interest in.

Take a made-up example. Olivia lives in Leeds and follows three coffee shops. Followers of those shops enter her candidate pool. Large pages from Leeds join them, along with coffee accounts Olivia looked at recently. Her colleague in Bristol gets a different set even with the same follows, because she lives in a different region.

How candidates get ranked

In the second step, the system estimates whether you will follow a candidate and whether you will open its profile. The Meta card names several signals for those predictions. Here are the clearest.

• Mutual friends you share with the candidate.
• Whether the candidate follows you, and for how long.
• How many accounts you followed yourself in the last 28 days.
• The candidate's follower count and whether its profile is private.
• How close you are to the owner of the account.

Three of the five signals describe connections between people. How long a candidate has followed you appears in four of the card's five predictions. Your interests shape the pool of candidates, and connections move them up or down. Our guide to getting recommended on Instagram covers how the system picks posts and reels for other people's feeds.

Why Instagram suggests you to people you know: contacts and mutual followers

Take a common case. Yesterday you followed a coworker, and today that coworker sees your page in suggestions. Meta's list of signals includes whether a suggested account follows the person. Your follow is that exact signal in your coworker's suggestions.

Shared follows and friends

The second route runs through a shared circle. You follow the same people as someone you know, or their friends. That makes you a candidate for them as a follower of accounts they follow. Mutual friends then move you higher in their list. This is how old classmates find each other without searching by name.

Contacts and Facebook

The third route starts outside Instagram. Among the tools for managing recommendations, Meta's Transparency Center lists connecting and disconnecting your contacts. Linking and unlinking a Facebook account sits right next to it. Since these settings change what you see, your phone book and Facebook connections count too.

This explains the cases that unsettle people most. Your nail technician saved your number and connected contacts. There are no follows or likes between you, yet your page can still appear in their suggestions. You can switch off contact syncing only for your own account. Your settings do not reach someone else's phone book.

Region

The fourth route needs no personal ties at all. Popular pages in a region become candidates for people who live in that region. That is how a local bakery gets suggested to people who have never heard of it.

How to remove yourself from suggestions on other profiles: the settings path

One profile setting controls whether you appear in rows of similar pages. Instagram Help describes it. You can change it only in a web browser, on a computer or a phone. The app does not offer it.

1. Open Instagram in a web browser and go to your profile.
2. Click Edit profile.
3. Toggle off Show account suggestions on profiles.
4. Click Submit.

The setting works both ways. Your account stops appearing in suggestions on other people's profiles. Visitors to your profile also stop seeing a row of similar profiles there. The page itself and its Follow button work as before.

Your follows and a private profile

Other people's suggestions depend on you too. Whether and how long you have followed someone are signals in their suggestions. A private profile does not keep you out of suggestions. The Meta card lists private status among the signals, not among the exclusions. So the system suggests private pages too. Privacy settings and suggestion settings live separately, and one does not replace the other.

How to hide a specific suggestion from your own list

An unwanted suggestion goes away right in the list. Meta's Transparency Center lists the tools every user has.

• The X on a card. It dismisses one suggestion, or a whole block of them in Stories.
• Discover more accounts. It shows a set built without personal signals.
• A fresh set. You can shuffle the cards or open the full list.
• Notifications. You can turn alerts about suggested accounts on or off.
• Restrict, mute, block. These act on one specific person.
• Unfollow. It helps the system stop recommending accounts like the one you dropped.

Two more settings change your set. Switch off contact syncing, and the system stops recommending accounts to you from your contact list. Unlink Facebook, and it stops using Facebook data for that too.

There is no single off switch among these tools. Suggestions go away one card or one block at a time. The X does not block anyone: the page stays in search and opens as before.

When a person bothers you more, blocking or restricting fits better. Our guide to blocking someone on Instagram covers what the other side sees with each option.

Similar accounts as a map of your niche: what the report shows

The same mechanism helps a business. The row of similar pages on a competitor's profile hints at which pages the system places next to it. But that row is personal: Instagram Help says people who tap Follow see profiles such as mutual friends or people they might know. So it is a hint, not a full map of the niche.

People build this list by hand in rounds: a profile, its row of similar pages, then the rows on each new page. Our guide to finding competitors on Instagram shows how to do it in one hour with a spreadsheet template.

What the Sled report gives you

The report gathers the accounts Instagram considers close to a given profile. The handle of a public page is enough, yours or someone else's. You do not sign in to your account. The list is built on audience overlap: it holds accounts followed by the same people who follow that page.

• Accounts the platform considers close to the profile you entered.
• Follower and post counts for each of them.
• Which are private and which are open to checking.
• The list as a CSV download.

The report does not decide who counts as a competitor. It is not a market study and not a list of people taking your customers. Some of these accounts will turn out to be direct competitors, and some will not. The report gives you the starting list, and the labels are yours.

From the finished list, pick your five closest competitors and check them once a week. Our guide to Instagram competitor monitoring covers what to compare from week to week.

Common questions