Instagram Trends

No, and there is no such thing to read. Instagram publishes no trending endpoint, no topic ranking and no hashtag volume to anyone who is not logged in. This board measures movement inside the Instagram catalog our own crawler maintains: the accounts we track, their follower history from our own daily snapshots, and the hashtags in the captions of posts we hold. An account nobody has ever pointed the crawler at cannot appear here however fast it is growing.

From us. Instagram exposes a profile's follower count right now and nothing about what it was last week, so growth data does not exist unless somebody records it. Our crawler snapshots each tracked account and rolls those snapshots into a daily table. The date the board is current through is printed above the first ranking, and it is the honest limit of how fresh any of this is.

Because either one alone is misleading. Ranked by followers gained, the board is just a list of the biggest accounts we track and tells you nothing. Ranked by percent, it fills with tiny accounts where forty new followers is a thirty percent week. So both are published, and the percent ranking carries a floor of 10,000 followers to keep it meaningful.

As the sum of followers gained across the category divided by the sum of followers it started the window with. It is deliberately not an average of the members' individual growth rates: averaging percentages lets one small fast-growing account outvote every large account in the bucket, which would rank the category on its least representative member.

No. Hashtag volume is not public on Instagram. This section counts how often a tag appears in the captions of posts our crawler has stored inside the window, and it only lists a tag used on at least 3 posts by at least 2 different accounts, so one account repeating its own tag cannot become a trend. Treat it as what the accounts we track are tagging, not as what Instagram is searching for.

The rollup behind it is rebuilt as the crawler revisits accounts, and the board itself is cached for a few hours rather than recomputed per visitor. The window switch offers 7, 14, 30 days; a shorter window is more current and noisier, a longer one is steadier and slower to notice a change.