Scout tracks competitor Instagram accounts for a creator and shows you which of their recent posts actually landed. It is included with every active plan, and you will find it in the workspace sidebar.
Adding a competitor
- Open Scout in the workspace of the creator you are scouting for.
- Type the competitor’s Instagram handle and press Track.
- We check with Instagram straight away. If the account can be tracked it appears as a tile; if not, you are told why immediately rather than being left with an empty page.
Their posts appear after the next daily collection.
Why some accounts cannot be tracked
Instagram only exposes public Business and Creator accounts to tools like this. Private accounts, ordinary personal accounts and deleted handles return nothing at all.
This is not unusual. Testing against real handles, 13 of 20 resolved — so expect roughly a third of any list to come back untrackable. There is no workaround; it is Instagram’s rule, and it applies to every tool equally.
Likes and comments, never reach
For an account you do not own, Instagram shares likes and comments and nothing else. There is no reach, no views, no impressions and no saves — not through us, and not through any other tool that claims otherwise.
So Scout scores competitors on engagement. Your own creators are scored on views instead, because those are accounts connected to Autoposter and we can see their insights. See Top content for that side.
The signals
A competitor’s post is flagged when it beats the middle of that account’s own recent posts of the same format:
| Signal | Means |
|---|---|
| Warm | 2× their typical post |
| Outlier | 4× |
| Breakout | 6× |
| Viral | 10× or more |
Everything is measured against the competitor themselves, so a 3,000-follower rival and a 300,000-follower one are each judged on their own terms. Reels are compared with reels and feed posts with feed posts. We need at least eight posts of a format before we will say what normal looks like for that account, so a newly added competitor shows no signals for a while.
Scout shows winners by default. Use Show everything if you want their ordinary posts too.
Two places to use Scout
Each creator’s workspace has its own Scout page, showing that creator’s rivals on their own.
Your Hub also has a Scout tab, which rolls every creator in your agency up together. From there you can:
- Add or remove competitors for any creator without opening their workspace.
- See at a glance how many competitors each creator has, how many are producing winners, and how many are gaining followers fast.
- Browse one combined feed of standout posts from across every creator’s competition, filtered by signal.
- Spot creators who cannot be scouted yet because they have no Instagram account connected through Facebook.
The Hub view only ever shows your own agency’s creators and the competitors you have added. It is not a view of other customers.
The flame
A competitor tile gets a flame when their follower count is climbing quickly. It needs a real gap between measurements and a large enough account to be meaningful, so a handful of new followers on a small account will not trigger it.
What it does not cover
TikTok is not available. TikTok restricts its research API to academic institutions and does not permit commercial competitor tracking, so there is no sanctioned route.
YouTube is not included either. Google’s API terms do not allow us to store or independently rank YouTube data this way.
Practical notes
- Scout refreshes once a day. Adding a competitor will not populate their posts instantly.
- You can track up to 100 competitors per workspace.
- Scout needs an Instagram account connected through Facebook in that workspace to run lookups. If you only have an Instagram Login connection, Scout will tell you.
- Removing a competitor stops collection; their history is removed with them.
- Scout covers posts from the last 30 days, up to their latest 50.
- If a competitor deletes a post, it disappears from Scout at the next daily refresh. If their account goes private or is deleted, all of their posts are removed from Scout.
- Scout shows each post’s photo or reel cover. It cannot play a competitor’s reel: Instagram does not release video from accounts you do not own. Use View on Instagram to watch it.