How to See Who Someone Follows on Instagram

How to see who someone follows on Instagram, in short: open their profile in the Instagram app and tap Following. If the account is public, the full list of accounts they follow is there for anyone to read. If it is private, you have to be an approved follower first, and no app or website can get around that. What the list does not tell you is when they followed each account or in what order, and since 9 September 2026 the order you see means nothing about time.

This guide walks through the built-in way, the limits worth knowing before you read anything into a list, and how a tool like SpyFollr makes the same list quicker to read and easier to check again later.

The built-in way: the Following list

Instagram shows two lists on every profile. Followers is the people who follow that account. Following is the accounts it follows. To see who someone follows:

Open the Instagram app and go to their profile.
Tap the Following count under their name.
Scroll the list. On a public account, every account they follow is in it.

That is the whole official method, and for a small account it is all you need. Nothing about it is hidden or unusual: a public account's Following list is public by design.

Public vs private: what you can and cannot see

Whether you can open the list at all depends on one setting on their side.

Public account. Anyone can open the Following list and read it.
Private account. Instagram's help page on the differences between public and private accounts says it plainly: people have to send a follow request and be approved before they can see the posts, the followers list or the following list.

That second rule has no workaround. Any site that promises to show a private account's Following list without being an approved follower is either guessing, recycling old data, or asking for your Instagram password. Never give it one.

What the Following list does not tell you

A Following list answers "who", and only "who". Three things are missing from it, and they are the things people usually want next.

When they followed each account

Instagram does not show other people's follow dates anywhere. It used to show some of this activity: the Following tab in the activity screen listed what the people you follow liked and who they followed, and Instagram removed it in October 2019, saying people did not always know their activity was surfacing. Nothing has replaced it.

The order they followed in

For years the top of someone's Following list roughly meant "most recent". That stopped on 9 September 2026, when Instagram changed how follow lists are returned for other people's public accounts. The list still loads, but its order has nothing to do with when anyone followed anyone, and it can come back in a different order a few minutes later. We measured the change ourselves; the details are in what changed in Instagram's following list order.

So reading the first ten names as their newest follows no longer works, for anyone.

Who they unfollowed

An account missing from the list today might have been unfollowed, might have been deactivated, or might have blocked them. The list alone cannot tell you which, and a long list you scroll twice will rarely look the same twice.

Reading a long Following list without losing your place

For an account that follows a few hundred people, scrolling is fine. Past that, a few habits help:

Know what you are looking for. If you are checking whether they follow one particular account, it is faster to look at that account's Followers list instead, if it is smaller.
Save what you saw. Take screenshots of the parts you care about, or note the handles. Instagram does not tell anyone when you screenshot a profile or a list; our guide to whether Instagram notifies screenshots lists exactly which screens can and cannot trigger a notice.
Compare later, not by order. If you come back in a week, compare names, not positions. Since September 2026 positions move on their own.

A faster way: look the account up in SpyFollr

SpyFollr does the same reading for you, and keeps the result so the next look can be compared with it.

Type a public username. There is no Instagram login, SpyFollr never asks for your password, and the account you look up is not notified.
Read the list. SpyFollr shows who the account follows and who follows it. The free plan shows a preview of each list and a few free checks a day; Pro unlocks the whole list as far as SpyFollr can read it.
See who is new next time. SpyFollr keeps a record of the accounts it has seen on each list. On your next look, accounts it has not seen before are marked as new, dated the day SpyFollr first saw them, not the moment of the follow, which nobody outside Instagram knows.
Let it watch for you. Pro re-checks the accounts you choose every few hours and sends a push alert when something new appears. How that works is on the recent follow tracker page; plans are on pricing.

What SpyFollr cannot do either

The same limits apply to us as to Instagram's own screens, and to every honest tool:

No private accounts. SpyFollr shows a private account's public header and stops.
No follow dates or order. "New" means new since SpyFollr started watching, nothing more.
No unfollows. A missing name is usually just a list that came back differently, so SpyFollr does not report it.
Very large accounts. On lists in the thousands SpyFollr can read only part of the list at a time, so it can tell you the count moved without naming every newcomer.

Looking up someone's follows responsibly

A public Following list is public on purpose, and a private one is private on purpose. Reading what someone chose to show is ordinary; trying to get around a private setting is not, and nothing legitimate will help you do it. Anyone whose public account was looked up on SpyFollr can ask not to be listed, as described in section 10 of our privacy policy.

If the account you are curious about is your own, you do not need any of this. Your own Instagram data export lists who you follow, with dates, and tools such as Unfollr read that export to show who unfollowed you or does not follow you back.

FAQ

Can you see who someone follows on Instagram?

Yes, if the account is public: open their profile and tap Following. If it is private, only followers the account has approved can see that list.

Can I see who a private account follows?

No. Instagram shows a private account's following list only to approved followers. A tool that claims to show it anyway is not telling the truth, and one that asks for your password is a risk to your account.

Is the Following list in the order they followed people?

Not any more. Since 9 September 2026 the order of a public account's follow lists has nothing to do with when the follows happened, and it can change between looks.

Does someone know when I look at who they follow?

Instagram does not tell anyone that their Following list was viewed. When you use SpyFollr you never sign in to Instagram, and the account you look up is not notified.

How can I see who someone followed recently?

Instagram does not show it directly. You can compare their list over time, or let a tracker do it: SpyFollr marks accounts it has not seen before and dates them the day it first saw them. The recent follow tracker page explains how.

Can I see who someone unfollowed?

Not reliably, for someone else's account. A name missing from one look is usually a list that came back differently, which is why SpyFollr does not report unfollows.