Find Paid Partnership Posts on Any Instagram Profile

Brands want to know which creators and publishers their competitors pay, and agencies want to know how much of a creator’s feed is already sponsored before they pitch. On Instagram that information sits in a small paid partnership line above each post and in the caption, one post at a time. Checking a hundred posts by hand means opening a hundred posts and reading every caption to the end.

Try it live: Instagram Post Scraper: Photos, Carousels, Likes, No Login. Pay per result delivered. Failed and empty results are never charged.

The Instagram Post Scraper returns every post on a public profile, photos, carousels and videos, as one row each, with the paid partnership flag, the coauthors, the tagged accounts and the full caption. A short filter over those fields gives you the list, and catches branded posts that the flag alone misses.

What you get and who it is for

Field	What it tells you
isPaidPartnership	True when the post carries Instagram’s paid partnership flag
coauthorProducers	Accounts credited as collab partners; a brand often shows up here
taggedUsers	Accounts tagged on the post or on any of its slides
caption, mentions, hashtags	Disclosure text such as “Presented by” or #ad, and the brand’s handle
type	Image, Sidecar (a carousel) or Video
likesCount, commentsCount	How the sponsored posts did next to the rest of the feed
timestamp, url	When the post went up and where to open it

This is for brand managers checking which accounts a competitor sponsors, influencer agencies measuring how sponsored a creator’s feed already is, and compliance teams checking that branded posts carry a disclosure.

The input

{
  "usernames": ["natgeo"],
  "maxPostsPerProfile": 300,
  "newerThan": "3 months"
}

• There is no input option for paid partnerships. The flag is on every row, so the filtering happens after the run.
• newerThan stops reading a profile at the first post older than the window, and maxPostsPerProfile (10 to 300) is the ceiling; whichever comes first ends that profile. natgeo put 14 posts on its grid in five days, October 1 to October 6, 2026, so three months of that account is a couple of hundred posts, inside the cap.
• postTypes is left at its default of all three types. Sponsored content can be a photo, a carousel or a video, and in our sample the flagged posts were single photos.
• usernames takes up to 500 profiles per run, so a whole list of creators or publishers can go in one run.

What the output looks like

[
  {
    "inputUrl": "natgeo",
    "shortCode": "DeEsdp9ISZf",
    "url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/DeEsdp9ISZf/",
    "type": "Image",
    "caption": "Presented by @Rolex. Conservation ecologist and Rolex National Geographic Perpetual Planet Explorer...",
    "hashtags": ["Rolex", "AfricaEarthsWildHome", "PerpetualPlanet"],
    "likesCount": 31489,
    "commentsCount": 77,
    "timestamp": "2026-10-04T13:02:58.000Z",
    "ownerUsername": "natgeo",
    "coauthorProducers": [],
    "taggedUsers": [],
    "isPaidPartnership": true
  },
  {
    "inputUrl": "natgeo",
    "shortCode": "DeE0VYSFMHJ",
    "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeE0VYSFMHJ/",
    "type": "Video",
    "caption": "A simple branch becomes a fishing rod in the hands of these resourceful chimpanzees...",
    "mentions": ["Rolex", "DisneyPlus", "hulu"],
    "likesCount": 32086,
    "commentsCount": 131,
    "timestamp": "2026-10-04T16:00:03.000Z",
    "ownerUsername": "natgeo",
    "coauthorProducers": ["rolex"],
    "taggedUsers": ["rolex"],
    "isPaidPartnership": false
  }
]

Both rows come from our run on natgeo and nasa on October 7, 2026, which read the 12 newest posts of each. Of natgeo’s 12 posts, 9 had “Presented by @Rolex” in the caption, but only 2 carried the paid partnership flag, both single photos like the first row. The second row, a reel, has Rolex as coauthor and tagged account and the same caption line near its end, yet isPaidPartnership is false. Counting the flag alone would have found 2 of the 9 Rolex posts, which is why the script below checks three signals.

Run it in Apify Console

1. Open https://apify.com/themineworks/instagram-post-scraper and click Try for free.
2. In Instagram profiles, replace the prefilled natgeo and nasa with the profiles you want to check.
3. Set Max posts per profile to 300 and Only posts newer than to 3 months. Leave Post types with all three selected, Skip pinned posts on, and Proxy as it is.
4. Click Start and wait for the run to finish in the Output tab.
5. Click Export and download CSV, JSON or Excel. In the sheet, filter isPaidPartnership to true, then search the caption column for “presented by”, “#ad” and “sponsored”.

Run it from Python

Install the client with pip install apify-client. The script flags a post when it has the paid partnership flag, a disclosure phrase in the caption, or a coauthor that is not one of the profile’s own sister accounts, and writes the flagged posts to a CSV.

import csv
import re
from collections import Counter

from apify_client import ApifyClient

PROFILES = ["natgeo"]
SISTER_ACCOUNTS = {"natgeoscience", "natgeotv", "natgeodocs", "natgeosociety", "natgeobooks"}
DISCLOSURE = re.compile(r"presented by|paid partnership|sponsored by|#ad\b|#sponsored", re.I)

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("themineworks/instagram-post-scraper").call(run_input={
    "usernames": PROFILES,
    "maxPostsPerProfile": 300,
    "newerThan": "3 months",
})

flagged, total = [], 0
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item.get("_type") == "info":
        continue  # the run summary row, never billed
    total += 1
    caption = item.get("caption") or ""
    partners = [u.lower() for u in item.get("coauthorProducers", [])
                if u.lower() not in SISTER_ACCOUNTS and u != item["inputUrl"]]
    reasons = []
    if item.get("isPaidPartnership"):
        reasons.append("flag")
    if DISCLOSURE.search(caption):
        reasons.append("caption")
    if partners:
        reasons.append("coauthor")
    if not reasons:
        continue
    mentions = [m.lower() for m in item.get("mentions", [])]
    flagged.append({
        "profile": item["inputUrl"],
        "posted": item["timestamp"][:10],
        "url": item["url"],
        "type": item["type"],
        "owner": item["ownerUsername"],
        "reasons": "+".join(reasons),
        "brand_guess": (partners or mentions or [""])[0],
        "likes": item["likesCount"],
        "comments": item["commentsCount"],
        "caption": caption[:200].replace("\n", " "),
    })

with open("paid_partnerships.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=["profile", "posted", "url", "type", "owner",
                                           "reasons", "brand_guess", "likes", "comments", "caption"])
    writer.writeheader()
    writer.writerows(flagged)

print(f"{len(flagged)} of {total} posts show a partnership signal")
print("by reason:", Counter(r for row in flagged for r in row["reasons"].split("+")))
print("by brand:", Counter(row["brand_guess"] for row in flagged).most_common(5))

On the 12 natgeo posts from our October 7 sample, the same logic flags 9 posts: 9 by caption, 2 by flag and 1 by coauthor, all pointing at rolex. Treat rows flagged only by coauthor as leads to review by hand, since collabs between friends, teams or sister accounts are common and most are not paid.

Run the audit every month

In Apify Console, save the input as a task with newerThan set to 30 days, open Schedules, create a schedule with the cron expression 0 8 1 * * (08:00 on the first of each month) and add the task. The schema has no “only new posts” option; the 30 day window does that job, and reading stops at the first older post, so you pay only for the month’s posts. Apify’s Google Sheets integration can send each month’s dataset to a sheet, and Make, Zapier, n8n or a webhook can post the flagged rows to Slack or your own system when the run finishes.

What it costs

The price is $1.49 per 1,000 posts on the Bronze plan, $1.29 on Silver, and $0.99 on Gold, Platinum and Diamond, plus a flat $0.005 run start fee per run. A carousel costs the same as a single photo.

An audit of 10 profiles with 100 posts each in the window is 1,000 posts: $1.49 on Bronze, $1.29 on Silver and $0.99 on Gold, plus one $0.005 start fee. A monthly recheck of a single profile at natgeo’s pace, about 80 posts a month, comes to about $0.12 on Bronze plus the start fee.

Limits worth knowing

• The flag only catches posts where Instagram shows the paid partnership label. Our natgeo sample shows branded posts without it, so read caption and coauthor matches as leads, not proof. A model reading the caption catches wordings a phrase list misses, and social posts are a common input for that kind of LLM work.
• There is no field that names the sponsor behind the flag. The brand has to come from coauthorProducers, mentions or the caption.
• Hashtag, keyword and location search need a login, which this actor never uses. You cannot search all of Instagram for #ad; give profiles or post links.
• You get like and comment counts, not comment text, and no view counts for video posts. For reel views, use Instagram Reel Scraper.
• Private accounts return no posts. They are listed in the run’s OUTPUT record and not charged.

Related

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• Export a Creator’s Instagram Reels With Play Counts to a Spreadsheet
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