How to See Someone's Recent Follows on Instagram (What Works and What Doesn't)

What happened to the Following activity tab

For a few years, Instagram had an Activity screen with two tabs: You and Following. The Following tab showed what the people you follow were doing, including new accounts they had followed and posts they had liked. It was the standard answer to "how do I see who someone recently followed on Instagram."

Instagram removed the Following tab in October 2019. Nothing replaced it. There is no official screen, setting, or hidden menu that lists the accounts another person followed recently. If an old tutorial tells you to open Activity and tap Following, it is out of date.

How to see your own recent follows (this one works)

If you only want to know who you followed recently, Instagram has a built-in way. Your own following list can be sorted by the date you followed each account. Menu names change from time to time, so this is how it looks as of October 2026.

1. Open your profile and tap Following.
2. Look for the sort or filter control near the top of the list.
3. Under sorting, choose Date followed: Latest to see the accounts you followed most recently, or Earliest to see the oldest ones first.

The same screen also lets you view categories such as accounts you interact with least and accounts that are shown most in your feed. That is useful when you are cleaning up who you follow.

This only works for your own list. The sort option does not appear on other people's profiles, which brings us to the part most guides get wrong.

Why the top of someone else's following list is not their latest follow

A popular tip says that when you open another person's Following list, the accounts at the top are the ones they followed most recently. It sounds logical, and it is wrong. It is widely reported that Instagram does not show someone else's following list in chronological order. The list is ranked, and the ranking can differ depending on who is looking.

What you actually see in that list

In practice, the top of another person's following list tends to be filled with accounts that matter to you: people you also follow, people who follow you, and accounts you interact with. Mutual connections float upward. Two different viewers can open the same profile and see a different order.

Instagram has not published how this ordering works, and most of what is written about it comes from user observation and a small number of write-ups, so treat the details as unconfirmed. What you can rely on is the practical takeaway: the list order is not a timeline, so you can't read "most recent follow" from it.

Why this myth keeps spreading

Your own list used to look chronological, and the old Following activity tab really was in time order. Both habits carried over into advice about other people's accounts. If someone shows you a screenshot and says "these are the people she just followed," they are guessing from a ranked list.

The method that works: compare two snapshots of their following list

Instagram doesn't record a public "recently followed" log, but you can build your own. The idea is simple. Save someone's full following list today. Save it again in a week or a month. Anyone who appears in the second list but not the first is a new follow in that window.

This works for a public account, and for a private account that you follow (because you can already see its list). It does not work for a private account you don't follow, since Instagram doesn't show you the list at all.

Step 1: Export the first snapshot

With the igbento extension installed, open the Instagram downloader page, create a new task with the account's profile link and choose the following list export. You can export any following list you can already see in Instagram, as CSV or JSON. igbento reads the list through your own logged-in session, so it never asks for your password, and the file is saved to your computer rather than uploaded.

Name the file with the account and the date, for example username-following-2026-10-21.csv. The date is the only timestamp this method has, so write it down.

Step 2: Wait, then export again

Pick a gap that makes sense for the account. A week works for someone who follows a lot of people. A month is enough for a quiet account. Then export the same list again and save it with the new date.

Step 3: Compare the two files in a spreadsheet

Open Google Sheets or Excel. Put the older list in one sheet called Old and the newer list in a sheet called New. Make sure the usernames are in column A of both sheets, starting at row 2 under a header.

1. In the New sheet, click cell B2 and enter =IF(COUNTIF(Old!A:A, A2)=0, "new follow", "").
2. Drag the formula down the whole column.
3. Filter column B to show only new follow. Those are the accounts in the newer list that were missing from the older one.
4. To see who was unfollowed instead, do the reverse: in the Old sheet, count each username against the New sheet.

If you prefer VLOOKUP, use =ISNA(VLOOKUP(A2, Old!A:A, 1, FALSE)). It returns TRUE for usernames that are not found in the old list. Both formulas give the same answer.

A no-formula option

Sort both lists alphabetically and put them side by side. Scan down both columns together. It is slower for long lists, but it works for a following list of a few hundred accounts. For anything bigger, use the formula.

What this method can't tell you

The snapshot method is honest, but it has real limits. Know them before you rely on the result.

• No exact dates. You only learn that a follow happened between snapshot one and snapshot two. If you export weekly, that is a seven-day window.
• Nothing before your first snapshot. The first export is a baseline. It cannot tell you what the person followed last week.
• Follow and unfollow between snapshots disappear. If someone follows an account on Tuesday and removes it on Thursday, and you export on Monday and Friday, you will see nothing.
• Private accounts are closed to you. If you can't see the following list in Instagram, you can't export it either.
• Large lists take time. Exporting thousands of accounts means thousands of requests, so expect it to take a while. Keep Instagram open and let it finish.

Also note what the igbento free unfollowers checker does here. It compares two exports of your own followers and following that you download from Instagram's Download your information page. It doesn't read other people's lists, so use the list export plus a spreadsheet for someone else's account.

Every method compared: accuracy, dates and whose account it works for

Here is how the options stack up as of October 2026.

The pattern is clear: anything that claims to show someone else's recent follows is either comparing snapshots or guessing from the ranked list.

Recent follows trackers: what they claim and what to watch for

Search for "recent follows tracker" and you will find web dashboards that promise a feed of who a tracked account followed, sometimes with timestamps. These tools usually work the same way described above: they check the account on a schedule, store each result, and show you the difference. The convenience is that they do the exporting and comparing for you in the background.

Things to check before you pay

• Pricing is often per tracked account. One publicly listed dashboard charges around $4.49 a month for each account you track, so costs add up if you follow several. Another lists $4.99 a week or $39.99 a year. Prices change, so check the current page.
• Private accounts are out of reach. No honest tracker can see the following list of a private account it has no access to. Be careful with any service that claims otherwise.
• History starts when tracking starts. Like the manual method, a tracker can't show follows from before it began watching.
• Never hand over your Instagram password. Instagram's help content, as relayed by third-party sources, lists giving your username and password to an outside app or site as a reason for its "we suspect automated behavior" warning. If you already did, change your password, turn on two-factor authentication, and remove the app under Apps and websites.

Doing it yourself costs nothing but a few minutes, and it keeps the data on your own computer. A paid tracker saves effort if you really need regular checks on several public accounts.

The button above is for the part of Instagram that is about your own account: finding who doesn't follow you back and cleaning up your following list. For details, see the unfollow tracker guide.

Privacy and respect: use this responsibly

Good reasons to compare following lists include market research on a competitor, checking which accounts a brand or creator you work with is picking up, and keeping an eye on your own account for strangers or bots. These are low-stakes and transparent.

Poor reasons include tracking an ex, monitoring a partner, or building a record of who a private person talks to. Don't do it. Don't contact, confront, or pressure someone based on who they follow. Follows are not a reliable signal of anything, and acting on a guess can hurt someone.

Keep it to accounts that are public by choice, never try to get around a private account, and delete exports you no longer need. igbento is not affiliated with Instagram or Meta.

If you really want to know about your own follower changes

Many people searching for recent follows actually care about their own account: who followed them lately, and who left. That is easier, because your own data is available. The guide to seeing who unfollowed you explains how to compare two downloads of your own data, and the guide to who doesn't follow you back shows how to list accounts that don't return the follow.

For a free option that works on a phone, open the unfollowers checker, upload your Instagram data file, and it shows who doesn't follow back and, with two files, who unfollowed you and who followed you since the older export. For plans and limits on the extension, see pricing.