How IGDetective Works
A plain-language explanation of what we track, how often, and what we deliberately don't see.
Written by Steven Duncan, founder of IGDetective.
Steven started building IGDetective in 2025 after spending months manually tracking an Instagram account to confirm a gut feeling about a relationship, and again when a family member needed to understand who their teenager was connecting with. Everything on this page describes how the product actually behaves, not a sanitized version for marketing. Read the full story.
The Short Version
IGDetective keeps watch on the public Instagram accounts you choose to track and shows you what changed: new follows, new followers, stories posted and engagement patterns, without asking for your Instagram login or anyone's password.
IGDetective is a web application at igdetective.com, built and operated since 2025 by Steven Duncan. It is unrelated to the open-source “IG-Detective” OSINT script on GitHub, which is a separate project.
What We Track
Follows & followers
New accounts they follow and new accounts following them, each dated the day we first see it. The date is not a follow time from Instagram, and follows first seen on the same day are not in order. Follow tracking runs on the paid plan.
Unfollows
Currently unavailable since Instagram's update on September 9, 2026. We would rather show no unfollows than ones we can't confirm.
Stories
Current stories on a public profile, plus an archive of stories saved before they expired (saved by hand on a free account, automatically on the paid plan).
Engagement signals
Likes and comments that are publicly attached to posts on the tracked profile, used to power Admirers Analysis and DeepSearch.
How Often We Refresh
Free accounts track 1 profile with no on-demand refresh. Paid accounts get one automatic refresh per tracked profile (up to 5 profiles) every 24 hours, plus unlimited on-demand manual refreshes, so the change history builds up without you having to remember to check.
What We Never See
Private content
Direct messages, archived posts, or anything behind a private profile's approval gate.
Your Instagram credentials
We never ask for your Instagram login.
Your identity on Instagram
Tracking is one-way: the profile you watch is not notified that you're watching.
Accuracy & Limits
Changes are only as fresh as the latest refresh: if a profile follows and unfollows the same account between two refreshes, that round-trip won't appear. A new follow is dated the day we first see it and can take a few days to appear. Some accounts can't be tracked for follows at all: private accounts, very large lists, and lists Instagram limits. The free eligibility check on the homepage shows which features work for an account before you sign up. We only show what is publicly visible on Instagram. We do not publish a fabricated accuracy percentage.
What Changed on September 9, 2026
On September 9, 2026, Instagram changed how follow lists work, and the order of another account's following and followers lists stopped reflecting when follows happened. We paused follow tracking that day and brought new follows and new followers back on September 12, each dated the day we first see it. Unfollow tracking is currently unavailable. Stories, posts, likes and comments were not affected. The full timeline is in our September 2026 update on tracking new follows.
Editorial Standards, Review & Corrections
The same rules apply to every guide and review we publish. They exist because we sell a competing product, so the only way our reviews of other tools can be worth anything is if every claim in them can be checked by you.
What counts as a source
Primary sources first: Instagram's own Help Center, published standards (for example the RFC that defines an HTTP 451 block), domain registry records (RDAP / ICANN Lookup), public DNS lookups, and Wayback Machine captures. When we quote a site's own claims we quote them verbatim and say when we captured them. We do not place followed links on sites we consider unsafe, and we never cite search-volume estimates as fact.
How a claim gets verified
Every “up”, “down”, “blocked” or “redirects” verdict is a dated live check you can repeat from any browser: we record what the URL returned (HTTP status, redirect target, or DNS failure) and the date. Product claims are tested, not paraphrased. When two official sources disagree, as Instagram's own pages do on activity-status visibility, we say so and describe the narrower, reliable surface instead of picking a side.
Who reviews it
Every guide is written and reviewed by Steven Duncan, the founder, who runs the product the guides describe. The live checks, quotes and factual claims are verified before anything is published, and the byline on each page is the person accountable for it.
Re-checks and updates
Review pages carry the date of each check. The anonymous viewer status table is re-run roughly monthly and whenever a reader reports a change; the result is added to the page as a dated Update entry rather than silently rewritten, so the history of a site stays visible. Every guide shows a published and an updated date, and the updated date changes only when the content does.
Corrections
If something on a page is wrong, tell us at support@igdetective.com or through the contact page. We re-check the claim, correct the page if it is wrong, and note the correction in the page's dated update log. People who appear in tracked data can ask to be excluded via the removal request page.
Independence
IGDetective competes with the tools it reviews, and every review says so in a “Full disclosure” paragraph before any verdict. We run no affiliate links, accept no paid placements, and do not publish sponsored reviews. This page is updated when we change what the product tracks or shows or when these standards change; material changes carry a new Last updated stamp below.
Last updated: 2026-09-14