Instagram Scraping in 2025: The Workarounds That Still Work
First, for all the lawyers out there reading this, we're only getting *public* data, so just relax.
Aight lets get into it:
Now, if you try to scrape via the browser, you're already cooked.
Using tools like puppeteer or selenium are easy to detect.
If you want to find the API that gets someone's public profile (their follower count, bio, links, etc), do this:
- Visit my IG page (adrianhorning)
- Next, we need to monitor the network requests as they're happening> Open the dev tools with right click > Inspect > Network (filter by Fetch/XHR)
- Scroll to the bottom, to the "Related Accounts"> Click on one
- Observe the requests
- Notice one that is named "web_profile_info"? That is probably the one we need 😅
Next, the http client you use is super important.
Use got-scraping from Apify.
It is incredible at getting around stuff.
And lastly, you'll need residential proxies.
There are a lot of providers out there, I have my personal favorites.
The just pretty much do that for all the public information you want.
Sometimes you need to include the headers that they are, so pay attention to that.
And to get additional pages of results, they use cursor based pagination, so just look for "cursor" (most of the time), in the payload.
If you want a solution that's already done for you, you can just call my IG profile endpoint, docs here: https://docs.scrapecreators.com/v1/instagram/profile