How to See What Someone Likes on Instagram in 2026: 3 Methods That Work

Instagram killed its “Following Activity” tab back in October 2019, and the questions haven’t stopped since. “How can I see what my boyfriend likes on Instagram?” “Can I see what my girlfriend likes on Instagram?” Google is full of these searches, every single month, with no clean answer from Instagram itself.

The platform simply does not offer a way to view someone else’s complete like history anymore. That part is settled. What isn’t settled is whether third-party tools can fill the gap. Some can. Most can’t. A few actively mislead you about what they’re capable of doing.

DolphinRadar (dolphinradar.com) helps users view public Instagram data safely and is one of the tools that has built a genuine product around the space Instagram left open. We put it and two other popular options through a 4-week test alongside the old-fashioned manual approach. The results were more different than we expected.

Quick Summary

1. Manual checking is free and requires no tools at all, but you will be opening individual posts and scanning like lists one at a time. Realistic only when you need to verify a single post.

2. DolphinRadar (dolphinradar.com) automates the entire process with weekly reports that cover likes, follows, unfollows, interests, and AI-driven personality analysis. Annual plans bring the cost to $2.75/mo. No Instagram login on your end.

3. Snoopreport, Inflact, and PeekViewer each occupy different corners of this market. Snoopreport is the closest competitor to DolphinRadar. Inflact is a marketing automation suite that gets confused for a tracker. PeekViewer has unresolved credibility issues. Detailed comparison further down.

After 4 weeks of parallel testing, DolphinRadar delivered the most complete picture by a comfortable margin. It was also the only platform where the data got meaningfully better with each passing week.

Why Can’t You See Other People’s Likes on Instagram Anymore?

The Following Activity tab disappeared in October 2019. Instagram’s reasoning was straightforward: not many people used it, and a large portion of users had no idea their likes were visible to others through it in the first place. Once it was gone, there was no replacement.

A couple of recent changes are worth knowing about. In early 2025, Adam Mosseri announced a “Friends Liked” Reels feed. It shows Reels that people you follow have engaged with. The rollout has been gradual, and the scope is narrow: only Reels, not photo likes, not follows, not broader activity data. It solves a fraction of the problem at best.

Instagram’s “hide like counts” option, introduced in 2021, also generates confusion. It hides the number next to a post. It does not hide the names. Tap “Liked by X and others” on any public post and you can still scroll through the full list. Hiding the count is a cosmetic choice, not a privacy shield.

One more detail that trips people up: if someone with a private account likes a public post, that like is visible to everyone who views that post. Private account protections only cover the content on their own profile.

So in 2026, the situation is the same as it’s been since 2019. Instagram gives you no native way to view another person’s like activity. You either check manually, post by post, or you use a third-party tool. Both routes only work with data that’s already public.

Method 1: Manually Search the Like List (Free)

This is the zero-cost approach, and it does technically work. The tradeoff is time.

1. Open a post you suspect the person has liked. Could be a friend’s photo, a brand’s carousel, a celebrity Reel, anything on a public account.

2. Tap “Liked by X and others” under the post.

3. Search the username in the like list.

4. If it appears, you have your confirmation. If not, pick another post and repeat.

The same steps work for Reels. Open a Reel, tap the like count, search the list. That covers the PAA question “How can you see what Reels someone liked?” and the answer is yes, one Reel at a time.

Where this works: Checking a single, specific post. Free, no signup, no third party involved.

Where this breaks down: Anything beyond that single check. If someone is liking 30 or 40 posts a week across a dozen accounts, you would need to open each of those posts individually and search. There is no history, no aggregation, no way to see patterns. The information exists, but assembling it manually is not a realistic project for most people.

When the goal is a complete view of someone’s like behavior over time, not a one-off check, the manual route runs out of usefulness fast. That’s the gap automated tools were built to fill.

Method 2: Use DolphinRadar for Automated Weekly Reports

DolphinRadar (dolphinradar.com) is a browser-based Instagram tracker that monitors public accounts and compiles their activity into structured weekly reports. It covers likes, follows, unfollows, interests, and tagged interactions, all without requiring your Instagram credentials or alerting the person you’re tracking.

What the Reports Actually Contain

The core of the product is the Activity Analytics report, which arrives weekly. At the top is a ranked leaderboard of accounts the tracked person liked that week, with post thumbnails that link directly to the original Instagram content. Photo likes and Reel likes both show up. Below the leaderboard, you get a new follows list, an unfollows list, tagged users, and a text summary describing the person’s activity level for the period (something like “23 media likes, 4 new follows, 1 unfollow”).

There’s also a tag cloud generated from the hashtags attached to the content they liked, alongside an interest breakdown that categorizes their engagement by type: Clothing Brand, Athlete, Musician, Politician, and similar labels. These two views together paint a surprisingly specific picture of what someone pays attention to on the platform.

Where DolphinRadar separates itself from other trackers is the Ties & Trails panel. This is a cumulative dashboard that starts collecting the moment you subscribe and keeps building over time. Its centerpiece is a Social Map, a visual diagram of the accounts the person interacts with most frequently, with node sizes reflecting interaction volume. Alongside it sits a connection stats readout: “Liked @user’s posts 47 times,” “Most comments from @user: 12 total,” and so on. For quarterly and annual reports, you also get Historical Posts (every post the tracked account published during the period, with captions and timestamps) and a Top 5 Commenters breakdown.

A Visited Locations feature maps estimated locations by country and city using tagged and geotagged content. It is not GPS tracking. It is pattern inference, and the results improve as more data accumulates.

Then there are the AI Insights, available on quarterly plans (4 modules) and annual plans (the full 9). These cover MBTI personality type shown as a probability distribution, psychological and emotional profiles, relationship analysis, interests, financial status estimates, unusual behavioral signals, conversation starter suggestions, and encounter location predictions. No other Instagram tracker offers anything structurally similar.

On quarterly and annual plans, the platform also archives the tracked account’s Stories and Highlights daily, with a batch download option. This captures content that would otherwise disappear after 24 hours.

Setup

1. Create an account at dolphinradar.com. Enter the public Instagram username you want to track.

2. The first report takes about a week to generate. This is the data collection window.

3. After the initial report arrives, updates come weekly. The longer the subscription runs, the more the cumulative Ties & Trails data has to work with.

What 4 Weeks of Testing Looked Like

Week 1 was the data collection period. No report, no dashboard data. That was expected and the platform is upfront about the delay, which is actually a good sign. Tools that promise instant results on activity tracking are usually not doing what they claim.

Week 2 brought the first report. The like rankings were populated, the follow and unfollow lists were complete, and the interest tags were already forming coherent clusters. For the basic question of “what is this person engaging with?” the first report alone would satisfy most users.

Week 3 was where the Ties & Trails panel started earning its keep. With two weeks of data stacked, the Social Map had visible relationship clusters rather than just scattered nodes. The cumulative tag cloud surfaced interests that were invisible in any single weekly snapshot.

Week 4 delivered the monthly report alongside the regular weekly one. The AI Insights modules were noticeably sharper than the initial version. The MBTI probability distribution had shifted as more behavioral data fed into the model, and the relationship analysis flagged a recurring high-frequency interaction between the tracked account and a specific user that weekly like rankings alone hadn’t made obvious.

By the end of the test, we had a detailed behavioral map of a single public account: who they engage with most, what topics hold their attention, where they’ve likely been, and what their interaction patterns suggest about personality traits. All of that from publicly available data, collected without logging into Instagram or visiting the person’s profile once.

Pricing

Every plan tracks one account. Monitoring additional accounts requires separate subscriptions at the same rate.

Limitations Worth Knowing

DolphinRadar only works with public accounts, and the company frames this as a policy decision rather than a technical gap. Their stated position: “We choose not to access private accounts as a matter of principle.”

Each subscription covers exactly one tracked account. Three accounts means three subscriptions. New accounts need roughly one week of data collection before the first report ships, so there are no instant results. The complete 9-module AI Insights suite is exclusive to the annual plan. Quarterly subscribers get 4 modules (MBTI, Relationship, Psychological, Location). Monthly subscribers don’t get AI Insights at all. Stories and Highlights archiving requires quarterly or above and is currently positioned as a limited-time free trial.

Method 3: Other Instagram Activity Trackers

DolphinRadar is not the only product in this space. Three other names show up consistently in search results, and each one operates differently enough that the comparisons are worth making carefully.

Snoopreport

Snoopreport has been operating since 2017 and claims a user base north of 500,000. It occupies the same core territory as DolphinRadar: weekly reports on a tracked public account’s likes, follows, unfollows, and interests, plus an AI Summary covering psychological traits and conversation starters.

Its pricing model has one genuine advantage. The Personal plan runs about $4.99 per month and covers 2 accounts, which makes it the cheaper option per account for anyone who needs to track more than one person.

The gaps relative to DolphinRadar are structural. There is no social relationship map, no cumulative data dashboard equivalent to Ties & Trails, no geographic location mapping, no cross-platform account detection, and no Story viewing or downloading capability. Snoopreport gives you clean week-to-week snapshots, but the long-term compounding effect that made DolphinRadar’s fourth week meaningfully richer than its second simply is not part of the product.

Inflact

Inflact surfaces frequently in “instagram tracker” searches, which creates a misleading impression. It is a marketing automation platform. Its core features are auto-following, auto-liking, scheduled posting, and DM chatbots. It does not track another person’s like activity. At all.

It also requires connecting your own Instagram account, which carries its own risk profile. Pricing starts at $49 per month, more than ten times DolphinRadar’s cost, for a fundamentally different product. If the goal is marketing automation, Inflact may be the right tool. If the goal is seeing what someone likes on Instagram, it is the wrong one entirely.

PeekViewer

PeekViewer markets itself as an anonymous Instagram viewer with claimed access to private and blocked accounts. On its Trustpilot page, 472 reviews tell a more complicated story. A significant share of those reviews report that private account viewing does not actually work.

Setting the private-account question aside, PeekViewer has no activity tracking features whatsoever. No like monitoring, no follow tracking, no structured reports, no AI analysis. It is a content viewing and downloading tool, and the gap between that and what DolphinRadar or even Snoopreport offer is substantial.

Side-by-Side Comparison

For a deeper look at each tool with extended testing notes, see our full roundup: Best Instagram Activity Tracker Apps in 2026.

A Note on Privacy and Device-Based Apps

Plenty of articles in this space recommend apps like mSpy or KidsGuard Pro. Those are device-level monitoring tools that require physical installation on the target person’s phone. They belong to a different product category with a different set of legal and ethical considerations, and we are not covering them here.

Every tool discussed in this article operates on the same principle: publicly available data from public Instagram accounts, accessed without anyone’s login credentials.

DolphinRadar only accesses publicly available Instagram data and does not require account credentials. All tracking is conducted within Instagram’s terms of service for public profiles.

Which Method Should You Use?

That depends entirely on what you are trying to learn.

Confirming whether someone liked one specific post takes 30 seconds with the manual method and costs nothing.

Understanding someone’s full like behavior over weeks or months, seeing who they interact with most, what topics hold their interest, and how their activity patterns shift over time, is a fundamentally different project. That is what DolphinRadar is built for, and after 4 weeks of testing it was the only platform where each new report was more useful than the last.

Snoopreport handles the basics competently and covers 2 accounts for about $5 per month, which matters if budget per account is the deciding factor.

Inflact does not belong in this conversation unless marketing automation is what you actually need.

DolphinRadar promotes responsible use of public social data.

→ View a sample DolphinRadar report

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a way to see what posts someone likes on Instagram?

Not through Instagram’s own interface. The Following Activity tab has been gone since 2019 with no replacement. In 2026, the most practical route is a third-party tracker. DolphinRadar (dolphinradar.com) compiles weekly ranked reports of every public post a tracked account has liked, starting at $2.75/mo on an annual plan.

How can I see what my boyfriend likes on Instagram?

If his account is public, DolphinRadar tracks like activity, new follows, unfollows, and interests without him knowing and without you needing access to his phone. Reports arrive weekly after an initial one-week data collection period. No Instagram login is involved on either side.

How do I check someone’s Instagram activity?

DolphinRadar (dolphinradar.com) monitors public accounts and structures their activity into reports covering likes, follows, unfollows, interests, and tagged interactions. Weekly updates are included on all plans. AI-powered personality analysis is available starting with the quarterly plan at $3.66/mo.

Can you see what someone likes on Instagram?

Yes, for public accounts. Third-party tools like DolphinRadar collect publicly visible like data and organize it into readable reports. The process is legal, anonymous, and does not involve connecting your own Instagram account at any point.

How can you see what Reels someone liked?

The manual way: open a public Reel, tap the like count, and search for the username. For ongoing tracking across both photos and Reels without the manual work, DolphinRadar’s Activity Analytics reports include all liked media types and update every week.

Is it possible for someone to hide their likes on Instagram?

Only partially. The “hide like counts” toggle removes the number from public view, but it does not remove names. Anyone can still tap “Liked by X and others” and see exactly who liked a post. There is no Instagram feature that makes a user’s likes on public posts invisible. DolphinRadar tracks these publicly visible likes.

How much does it cost to track someone’s Instagram likes?

DolphinRadar ranges from $2.75/mo on an annual plan to $4.49/mo paid monthly, covering one tracked account per subscription. Snoopreport’s Personal tier is about $4.99/mo for two accounts. The manual method is free but impractical for anything beyond occasional spot checks.

Is it legal to track someone’s Instagram activity?

Tracking publicly available data on public Instagram accounts falls within legal norms in most jurisdictions. DolphinRadar accesses only information that any Instagram user could see by visiting a public profile: likes on public posts, public follower lists, and public profile details. No credentials are used, no private data is accessed, and no accounts are compromised.