How to see someone's most viewed Reels on Instagram

Sooner or later you want to see someone's most viewed Reels on Instagram. A competitor before a planning session, a creator you admire, a brand you are about to pitch. The numbers are public, and Instagram will not put them in order.

Here is the slow way, the fast way, and what to do once the best ones are in front of you.

The manual way

Open the Reels tab and scroll. Every tile carries a view count, so in principle you can find the biggest by eye.

In practice it falls apart around the fiftieth Reel. You are comparing 1.2M with 980K with 1.1M across several screens, the grid keeps loading, and you lose your place. On an account with hundreds of Reels it is an afternoon.

The pinned row is not a shortcut. Pinned Reels are the creator's picks, and creators often pin what they are proud of instead of what performed.

See the most viewed Reels in order

Sort Feed is a research tool for Chrome that ranks the grid for you. With it added, open the profile, click the Reels tab, then click the Sort Feed icon in your toolbar. Install Sort Feed covers setup.

Choose how far back to look under Filters, then click Views. A banner counts the Reels as they load, and the grid returns with the most viewed first and the count on every card.

The free plan sorts the latest 25 Reels or the last week. That is enough for an active account's recent best. Pro reaches back 1,000 Reels or across the whole profile.

What you can see

Sort Feed sees what your Instagram account sees. Any public profile works, and so does a private one you already follow. A private profile you do not follow stays private.

Nobody is told. The sort happens in your browser, on a page you could have scrolled yourself. It does not like, follow or view anything on your behalf, and refreshing the page puts the profile back.

Reading the top ten

A ranked list is only the start. The useful part is working out why those ten rose.

• Watch the first three seconds of each. The hook is usually the reason.
• Check the dates. Ten hits from two years ago say less than three from last month.
• Look for a repeated topic or format among them.
• Switch Sort by to Comments and see which ones move up.

Clicking a card opens it in the player over the grid, with the numbers beside the video. The arrow keys move through the ranking, so ten Reels take a couple of minutes.

If the account is large, try outlier score as well. It ranks each Reel against the account's own normal, which separates a true breakout from a post that was shown to a big audience.

Keep what you find

Copy puts the ranked list on your clipboard, and Export sends it to CSV, Excel or a Google Sheet with links, dates and counts. Select lets you tick a few Reels first, so the file holds your shortlist and not the whole grid.

Download saves the clips themselves, which is handy for a swipe file you can watch offline. The same steps work on a profile's Posts tab, ranked by likes or comments, since Instagram publishes view counts only on Reels.