Instagram Mentions Scraper

Instagram Mentions Scraper: public posts other people made about a handle

Type an Instagram handle and get back the posts other accounts made about it. Tagged in the photo, named in the caption, or credited as a co-author. One row per post, with the link, the caption, who posted it, likes, comments and the images.

One thing to square away first, because it shows up in every row. Timestamps are worked out from the post id, not read off the post, so timestampIsApproximate is always true. Measured against real publish times it lands within about half a minute, which is fine for sorting and grouping by day and wrong for anything that needs the exact second.

🔍 What Instagram Mentions Scraper does

It reads the tagged feed of the handles you name and returns what other people published about them. Four kinds of mention land in the same row shape, and mentionTypes tells you which you got: tagged in the photo, named in the caption, credited as a co-author, or tagged on the post.

Nothing to log into, no API key, no app review.

There is one gap worth knowing about. A minority of public accounts, and age-restricted brands are the usual case, are not identified to a reader who is not signed in. Those come back as a labelled NOT_FOUND row rather than silently empty, and your own cookie in sessionCookies is what opens them.

Set onlyTagged when you want the real endorsements and not every account that typed the brand name into a caption.

📥 What you give it

{
  "usernames": ["redbull", "gopro"],
  "maxItems": 100,
  "onlyTagged": false
}

Start a run with nothing filled in and you get one labelled sample row showing the output shape. That row is not charged.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run. The long image links are trimmed with ..., and the caption is cut short because it carries emoji:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "mention",
  "mentionedUsername": "redbull",
  "mentionedUserId": "476322",
  "mentionType": "coauthor",
  "mentionTypes": ["coauthor"],
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrQ8KTmuCrN/",
  "shortCode": "CrQ8KTmuCrN",
  "postId": "3085230335784921805",
  "type": "reel",
  "caption": "when worlds collide ...",
  "hashtags": ["RedBullFathom", "redbull", "givesyouwiiings", "redbullsnow", "snowboarding"],
  "mentions": ["mammothmountain"],
  "ownerUsername": "redbullusa",
  "ownerId": "40813406313",
  "likesCount": 52189,
  "commentsCount": 104,
  "viewsCount": null,
  "timestamp": "2023-04-20T16:28:58.150Z",
  "timestampIsApproximate": true,
  "displayUrl": "https://scontent-arn2-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.71878-15/...",
  "images": ["https://scontent-arn2-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.71878-15/..."],
  "taggedUserIds": [],
  "coauthorUsernames": ["redbull"],
  "isVideo": true,
  "productType": "clips",
  "carouselCount": 0,
  "dimensions": {"width": 720, "height": 1280},
  "accessibilityCaption": null,
  "inputUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/redbull/tagged/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T01:25:45.062Z"
}

That row shows the shape well: you asked about redbull, redbullusa published the reel, and Red Bull is on it as a co-author.

Nothing is guessed. A field Instagram did not send comes back null.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row land in your dataset, and only the first kind is billed.

Filter on recordType == "mention" and you have your posts. Rows also carry a charged flag, which is how the actor labels real rows against samples and diagnostics.

The errorCode names the handle it belongs to and says what happened:

A diagnostic row never bills you for results, and one bad handle does not stop the others.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Instagram Mentions Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put the handles you want mentions of into Instagram usernames, one per line. 3. Set Maximum rows. Start at 20 while you look at the output shape. 4. Tick Only posts tagged in the photo if caption name-drops are noise to you. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.44 per 1,000 posts. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

One charge per row delivered. A post dropped by onlyTagged never becomes a row, so it is never billed. Sample rows and diagnostic rows are not billed, and a handle nobody has mentioned is not billed for results.

One case to know: a post that mentions two of your handles comes back as two rows, one under each handle, and both are billed. That is deliberate, because each row answers a different question, but it is worth knowing before you paste in 200 handles from the same brand family.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching what creators post about a brand without asking the brand for its tagged feed.
• Finding the accounts that keep showing up around a product, then approaching the good ones.
• Measuring a campaign hashtag against real tagged posts rather than caption name-drops.
• Collecting user photos of a product as reference, with the image links already in the row.

🚧 What it does not do

• Timestamps are approximate. They come from the post id, close to the real time but not exact,

and every row is flagged as such.

• No video files. You get the cover image. viewsCount is often null as well.
• No follower counts or display names for the poster, only the handle and the id.
• No private accounts, and no stories or highlights.
• The order is Instagram's, not newest first. Sort on your own side.
• The same post can be billed twice when it mentions two of your handles.
• Twenty empty handles in a row stop the run early, with a row saying so.
• 10,000 rows and 200 handles per run. Bigger jobs need splitting.

🧭 Which Instagram scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an Instagram account? No. The cookie field is there for the small number of accounts that will not answer a signed-out reader at all.

Why is the same post in my results twice? Because it mentioned two of the handles you asked about, so it appears once under each.

Why is viewsCount empty on a video? Instagram does not publish a view count on this feed. Likes and comments are there.

How exact are the timestamps? Close, not exact. They are derived from the post id and every row says so. Good enough to sort and group by day.

Is scraping Instagram legal? This reads public posts only, never private accounts or messages. Results can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the handle you used and the run ID. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually explains it on its own.