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"Easy to connect - work's smooth and properly!"
Robert Podsiadlo, Founder at PrimeStuff
Monitor brands, competitors, and trends in real-time with automated social media tracking.
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Video discusses upcoming social media trends including AI-generated content...
"It was very easy to set up and get going, and support was superb."
Ziv Erlichson, Founder at Plynn
"Quick, caring and efficient support!"
Thomas Puech, Designer
"Easy to connect - work's smooth and properly!"
Robert Podsiadlo, Founder at PrimeStuff
Start extracting insights from Social Media Videos in minutes, and save days of development.
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Get started in minutes
// Search Instagram reels by keyword
const url = "https://api.socialkit.dev/instagram/reels-search"
+ "?query=cats"
+ "&page=1"
+ "&access_key=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY";
const response = await fetch(url);
const { data } = await response.json();
// data.items[] => [{ shortcode, views, caption, author, thumbnailUrl, ... }]
data.items.forEach(reel => {
console.log(`${reel.views.toLocaleString()} views — ${reel.url}`);
console.log(` by @${reel.author.username}: ${reel.caption.slice(0, 80)}`);
});
// Hashtags work too — pass "#dogs" or "%23dogs"
// Pagination: pass page=2 to get the second 12 reels (max 2 pages)Discover trending reels, mine top creators, and study what works on Instagram — all without an Instagram account.
See how teams are using this API in production
Find the top-viewed reels for any niche or hashtag. Track what topics, formats, and hooks are currently winning the algorithm.
A content team monitors 30 niche keywords daily, surfacing reels with >1M views into a Slack channel for editorial inspiration.
Discover rising creators in any vertical by scanning who appears in the top reels for their niche keywords.
An influencer agency scans 100 niche keywords weekly, building a database of creators whose reels consistently break 500K views.
Pull captions from the top reels for a topic and feed them into an LLM to extract winning hook patterns.
A short-form video studio extracts captions from the top 24 reels per niche, classifying hook types to inform their own scripts.
Search for branded keywords daily to catch reels mentioning your brand or competitors.
A DTC brand searches its name + 5 competitor names daily, alerting on any reel that mentions them publicly.
Integrate with your existing tools and platforms
Run keyword searches on a schedule and surface viral reels in real time.
Mine reels search results to build a database of creators per vertical.
Pull top reels per keyword, summarize captions with AI, generate content briefs.
An Instagram Reels Search API is a REST endpoint that searches Instagram for reels matching a keyword or hashtag and returns them as structured JSON. You pass a query, the API returns up to 24 reels with shortcodes, captions, view counts, thumbnails, and author details.
SocialKit's Reels Search API works without any Instagram account, cookies, or proxy setup. It hits Instagram's public popular-search render through an automated browser session, parses the inline JSON Instagram ships in the SSR, and returns it as clean JSON to your code.
Manual reel discovery doesn't scale. Content teams, agencies, and analytics platforms need to monitor dozens of keywords across niches to spot trends, surface creators, and inform content strategy. Browsing Instagram by hand and screenshotting top reels is a non-starter for any team operating at scale.
The Reels Search API replaces that with a single REST call per keyword. Pass cats, get the top 12 cat reels right now. Pass #cooking, get the top 12 cooking reels. Pipe the results into Make, Zapier, Airtable, or your own backend and build trend dashboards, creator databases, or alert systems on top.
Want to test it manually first? Use the free Instagram reels search tool to run a search in your browser and inspect the response shape.
Each call returns up to 12 reels. Pass page=2 to get the next 12. Instagram caps anonymous popular-search results at ~24 reels per query, so page is bounded to 2.
If you need more depth per query, the workaround is to search related keywords. The popular-search page itself surfaces 30 related-keyword suggestions per query — those are good leads for adjacent searches that will return another 24 reels each.
Results are cached for 30 minutes per query — a cold call takes ~10–15s while we render the page; subsequent calls return in under 2s.
Comprehensive social media analysis APIs for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook content.
Extract video summaries, transcripts, comments, and engagement metrics from social media content with our powerful Social Media Data Extraction API.
Video discusses upcoming social media trends including AI-generated content...