See Your Mutual Followers on Instagram (Full List)

How it works

1. 1

   Request a Followers and following export

   In the Instagram app go to Settings and privacy → Accounts Centre → Your information and permissions → Export your information → Create export. Pick your Instagram profile, tick only Followers and following, set the date range to All time, the format to JSON, and choose Download to device.

2. 2

   Collect the ZIP when Instagram emails you

   A followers-only export is normally ready in 10–20 minutes. Instagram sends an email with a download link that stays valid for four days; the same file is also listed on the Export your information screen.

3. 3

   Upload the ZIP on this page

   Pick the ZIP in the uploader above. Your browser reads the followers and following files locally, compares them, and shows the result straight away. Nothing is sent to a server, and you can close the tab whenever you like.

What Instagram's "followed by" hint shows — and what it doesn't

Open someone else's profile and under their bio you'll see "Followed by" plus two or three names and a count. That line answers a specific question — which of the people you follow also follow this person — and it is capped, ranked by Instagram's guess at relevance, and about their profile, not yours. Tap it and you get a list of the people you follow who follow them. Useful for judging a stranger; useless for seeing your own network.

There is no equivalent on your own profile. Instagram has no screen that says "these 412 people follow you and you follow them". The guide to seeing mutual followers walks through the few manual tricks, and all of them come down to opening accounts one at a time. For the full list you need the two underlying files, which the data export gives you.

A mutual follower is …

In this tool's terms, a mutual is any username present in both following.json and the followers_N.json files from one export. Both directions of the relationship exist at the moment Instagram generated the file. A mutual is not necessarily a close friend, a frequent commenter or someone who sees your posts — it is a structural fact about two follow buttons, nothing more.

One detail worth knowing about the date shown next to each mutual: the export records a timestamp for every follow, but a mutual appears in two files with two different timestamps. UnfollowChecker displays the date you followed them, taken from the following file, so the column means the same thing across the mutuals and non-followers lists. The followers CSV, downloadable free, has the other direction — when they followed you.

Getting your full mutuals list

Request the export from Accounts Centre → Your information and permissions → Export your information → Create export. Tick only Followers and following, choose All time so no older follows are dropped, pick JSON, and Download to device. The export walkthrough has each screen if you want to see it before you start. Instagram emails a link, usually within 10–20 minutes; the link is valid for four days.

Upload the ZIP on this page. The browser intersects the two username sets and shows how many mutuals you have, alongside your non-followers and fans counts. Deleted accounts, which appear as nameless placeholders in the export, are set aside and counted so your totals reconcile. Nothing is sent anywhere; close the tab and the ZIP is gone from memory.

Free count, paid list: how the pricing works

The mutuals count is free on every upload, and so are CSV downloads of your complete followers and following lists with dates — you could, if you wanted, intersect those two CSVs yourself in a spreadsheet. The mutuals list written out for you, with profile links and dates, is part of the Fans & Mutuals add-on: $3 on top of the $2.99 non-followers unlock, bought together at checkout. The add-on covers both the mutuals list and the fans list, and both are emailed as CSVs.

The reason the lists are split from the counts is simple: counts are cheap to show and are the thing most people want, while the full lists are what people who are doing something with the data are after. There is no account to create and no subscription.

Uses for a mutuals list

The obvious use is a sanity check on who your audience actually is. Creators often find that mutuals are a small fraction of followers and a large fraction of comments — the people who talk back. A mutuals CSV is also the starting point for a Close Friends list, for choosing who to tag in a giveaway, or for working out which accounts from an old following spree have stayed connected. Compared with the followers vs following ratio, which tells you nothing about relationships, the mutuals list is the relationship.

Over time, a mutual can become a non-follower without any notification. If you keep your exports, the free unfollowers diff shows who dropped out of your followers list between two dates — including former mutuals.

What this tool can't do

It can't show mutual followers between you and a specific other person — that's what Instagram's own "followed by" line on their profile is for, and the export doesn't contain their lists. It can't rank mutuals by how often they interact, because the export has no engagement data. It doesn't update live, and it won't follow or unfollow anyone. It lists the overlap exactly as it stood when the export was generated, which is the one thing Instagram itself won't do. The same mutuals view runs for Threads.

Frequently asked questions