How to research a competitor's reels on Instagram

We looked at the creators with five or more viral reels in our library, more than 3,700 of them. The middle one made 69% of those hits in a single format: a tutorial, a skit, a story. Four in five made at least half of their hits the same way.

So a competitor's best reels usually aren't luck. They repeat something, and that something is often learnable. Researching their reels is how you find out what it is.

You can do most of it on your phone, and it costs nothing. This guide walks through the manual way first, step by step, then shows where a tool saves you time. Fair warning: we make one of those tools, Aubrium, so we show where every number comes from.

What can you see about a competitor for nothing?

More than you'd think. On a public account, every reel is public, and so is its view count, caption, comments, sound and posting date. What you can't see is their Insights. Instagram only shows those for posts, stories, reels and live videos you've created yourself.³

Three other places fill in some gaps.

None of these tells you which of a rival's reels worked better than their others, or why. For that, you do the sums yourself.

How do you research a competitor's reels, step by step?

You need a phone, a notes app and a list of rivals. Here's the method we'd use.

Here's how the sums work. Say a rival's last 12 reels got between 2,100 and 41,000 views, and the middle one is 5,800. Three times that is 17,400, so two reels clear the bar: one at 41,000, about seven times their usual, and one at 19,500, about three and a half. Those two are the ones worth your time. The other ten tell you what normal looks like.

Why the middle number and not the average? Because one big hit drags an average up. A rival with one reel at a million views would make every other reel look like a flop. We go deeper on this, and on why accounts your size make the best yardstick, in our guide to outlier reels.

What should you write down for each reel?

The parts you could use in your own reel. Most of them are visible in the first few seconds.

Two of these are worth extra care, because they're where most viral reels make their move. The first is the hook. Among the viral reels in our library, most put it on screen as text, and only one in seven said it out loud without writing it too.

That's why you watch a rival's reel with the sound off at least once. A hook that only works with the sound on is the exception among viral reels. More on that in our look at whether reels need text on screen: 83.7% of the viral reels in our library have some. And if you're wondering how long that first line should be, we measured hook length too.

The second is length. Note it on their hits, not their misses.

The middle viral reel ran 21 seconds, and half of them ran between 12 and 46. Shorter hits also travelled further for their account's size. That doesn't mean shorter is always better: long reels can work, and a rival's hits will tell you whether they do in your niche.

What does a rival's pattern look like?

Usually one format, done again and again with a new idea each time. That's what the number at the top of this page shows. Among the creators with five or more viral reels in our library, the middle one made 69% of their hits in one format. If formats were picked at random, you'd expect about a third.

So once you've broken down a rival's best reels, ask three questions. What format do the hits share? How does the first line work? And what's the idea underneath, the thing their audience keeps coming back for?

That last question matters most, because it's the part you can make your own. A cooking creator whose hits are all "what I eat in a day on a budget" isn't winning on the recipes. They're winning on the budget. You can make that reel about your own life.

What you shouldn't do is remake their reel shot for shot. Instagram's own advice is a good test: if someone could take your part out of a post and it would be "virtually the same", it probably needs more of you in it.⁹ Accounts that mostly post other people's work get shown to fewer new people. Keep the shape and the idea, and make everything else yours.

Where does a tool save you time?

In three places. The manual method works, but it's slow. Ten rivals means writing down 120 numbers, and you have to do it again next week. You'll miss a rival's new hit until you happen to check. And you'll only ever research accounts you already know about.

Here's what each tool people name for this job does with a rival's reels.

In Aubrium, you type a rival's handle and it pulls their recent posts and ranks them against that account's own normal. It reads their latest reels and counts what the best ones have in common: the hook, the format, how often there are words or a face on screen, and when they post. It puts your last 12 reels next to theirs, and then keeps watching their new reels for 30 days and tells you when one takes off.² Any public account with at least 24 posts works, and they're never notified.¹⁰

Each rival costs 40 Sparks for 30 days, so the $49 plan's 100 Sparks covers two rivals a month with some left over.¹ It also only covers Instagram, and it doesn't post or schedule anything for you. If you don't know who to watch, it suggests accounts your size in your niche that are going viral now.²

Dedicated trackers like Creadar, CILA, ViralSpot and Sandcastles do similar sums for accounts you add, and we compared ten of these tools on features and price. Whichever you use, check its sums against the Reels tab once. In our team's hands-on study of these apps, 7% of Sandcastles' outlier scores were broken, with the score equal to the view count, and CreatorHouse scored the same reel 0.5 or 1.6 depending on the time window picked.⁸

Is it okay to research a competitor's reels?

Yes. Plenty of people search for how to spy on a competitor's reels, but there's nothing secret going on. Everything in this guide is public: the views, the captions, the sounds, the ads. You're doing what any business does when it walks into a rival's shop and looks around.

What isn't okay is taking their reel. Learn from it, then make your own.

Questions people ask

How we did this

The method is the one we'd use ourselves, written out step by step. Aubrium's library numbers come from its own database, read on 4 November 2026: the creators with five or more viral reels and how many of each one's hits shared a format, how viral reels deliver their hook, and the length of the viral reels we have a length for. To check the pattern wasn't chance, we compared it with formats drawn at random from the library's own mix. Every reel in the library already went viral, so none of these numbers is the chance that a new reel will.

The tracker findings come from our team's hands-on study of these apps in October 2026. What Instagram, Meta, Social Blade and Metricool offer comes from their own pages, read on 4 November 2026. Social Blade's and Instagram's live pages block fetchers, and Meta's help page loads only in a browser, so we read archived copies, dated below. We didn't test Social Blade or Metricool hands-on for this guide. And yes, Aubrium makes this page.

Sources

1. 1
   Aubrium pricingaubrium.com · Plans, and "Track a rival: 40 Sparks / 30 days". Read 4 November 2026.
2. 2
   Analyse Competitorsaubrium.com · What you get for each creator; your last 12 reels next to theirs; who you can add. Read 4 November 2026.
3. 3
   View insights on Instagram, archived copy of 13 October 2026Instagram Help Center · Insights "for specific posts, stories, reels, and live videos you've created". Read 4 November 2026.
4. 4
   About the Meta Ad Library, archived copy of 4 October 2026Meta Business Help Center · "contains all active ads that are shown across Meta technologies", plus branded content with a paid partnership label; search an advertiser to see its active ads' creative and copy. Read 4 November 2026.
5. 5
   Social Blade, archived copy of 3 November 2026Social Blade · "tracks daily statistics and growth"; its plans, archived 1 November 2026: Bronze $59.99 a year, and "data is only available from the day a profile is first added to our system"; an Instagram profile, archived 3 October 2026: followers, engagement rate, average likes and comments, no reels. Read 4 November 2026.
6. 6
   Metricool pricingmetricool.com · The free plan analyses 5 competitor profiles; Starter from $25 a month, before VAT. Read 4 November 2026.
7. 7
   Competitor analysisMetricool help · Posts sorted "by the metric of your choice", from "the 1st of the previous month"; and adding competitors: "You can only add professional accounts." Read 4 November 2026.
8. 8
   We ran 1,300+ searches in 8 viral reel findersAubrium · Our team's hands-on study, October 2026: broken outlier scores, a score that moved with the time window. Read 4 November 2026.
9. 9
   Original content guidelines, archived copy of 30 September 2026Instagram for Creators · "if someone could remove your contribution to your post or reel, and the content would virtually be the same, it probably needs more of you in it." Read 4 November 2026.
10. 10
    What is tracking a rival?Aubrium Help Center · "We pull their recent posts and rank them against their own normal"; "They're never notified, and nobody else can see who you track." Read 4 November 2026.

Changelog

• 2026-11-04First version.