Instagram Creator Data API: Bio, Contact Links, and Category

If you are searching for an “Instagram email finder API”, the honest answer is uncomfortable: the private Instagram data that a paid API can return does not include the creator’s email address or phone number. Those fields exist in Instagram’s own business-contact model, but a public-data extraction layer cannot legitimately hand them to you, and this API does not.

What you can get is a stable set of contact signals that are public by design: the bio, the external link, the business or brand category, the declared contact method, and location fields. For most outreach and CRM use cases, that is enough to route a creator correctly — and it is defensible, because you are reading what the creator published. This guide shows exactly which fields you get, with no invented columns.

What the profile endpoint returns

A single call — /v1/user/by/username — is the whole creator-data toolkit. It costs 1 credit and returns the profile object. The contact-relevant fields are:

Profile routes available for this: /v1/user/by/username, /v2/user/by/username, /v1/user/by/id, /v1/user/by/url, plus the richer /gql/user/web_profile_info and /gql/user/about. The v2 and GraphQL variants also expose bio_links, Instagram’s multi-link feature, which can hold more than the single external_url.

Worked example: a real business account

Fetching a well-known business account shows the shape of the data. This is a real response body, trimmed to the contact-relevant keys:

curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer gs_your_key" \
  "https://gramscraper.com/api/instagram/v1/user/by/username?username=nike"

{
  "pk": 13460080,
  "username": "nike",
  "full_name": "Nike",
  "biography": "Just Do It.",
  "external_url": "http://empli.fi/nike",
  "is_business": true,
  "account_type": 2,
  "business_contact_method": "CALL",
  "category_name": null,
  "business_category_name": null,
  "address_street": "One Bowerman Dr",
  "city_name": "Beaverton, Oregon",
  "zip": "97005",
  "latitude": 45.5076448,
  "longitude": -122.8269159,
  "public_phone_country_code": "",
  "follower_count": 291166543,
  "following_count": 266,
  "media_count": 1667,
  "is_verified": true
}

Read that response carefully and the honest picture is right there. You get the bio, the bio link, the declared contact method, the category slots, and a full business address with coordinates. You do not get a public_email, and the phone-number fields that would carry a business number are absent. public_phone_country_code exists as an (empty) country-code slot but arrives without its number, so treat it as unusable.

Node.js

const BASE = "https://gramscraper.com/api/instagram";
const KEY = process.env.GRAMSCRAPER_API_KEY;

async function creatorRecord(username) {
  const url = new URL(`${BASE}/v1/user/by/username`);
  url.searchParams.set("username", username);

  const res = await fetch(url, { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${KEY}` } });
  if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`HTTP ${res.status}`);
  const p = await res.json();

  return {
    username: p.username,
    full_name: p.full_name,
    followers: p.follower_count,
    verified: p.is_verified,
    is_business: p.is_business,
    bio: p.biography || "",
    link: p.external_url || null,
    category: p.category_name || p.business_category_name || null,
    contact_method: p.business_contact_method || null,
    city: p.city_name || null,
    // Record what you actually got, so nothing silently becomes a fact.
    has_email_field: false,
  };
}

console.log(await creatorRecord("natgeo"));

Python

import os, re, requests

BASE = "https://gramscraper.com/api/instagram"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['GRAMSCRAPER_API_KEY']}"}

def creator_record(username):
    r = requests.get(
        f"{BASE}/v1/user/by/username",
        headers=HEADERS,
        params={"username": username},
    )
    r.raise_for_status()
    p = r.json()
    return {
        "username": p.get("username"),
        "full_name": p.get("full_name"),
        "followers": p.get("follower_count"),
        "verified": p.get("is_verified"),
        "is_business": p.get("is_business"),
        "bio": p.get("biography") or "",
        "link": p.get("external_url"),
        "category": p.get("category_name") or p.get("business_category_name"),
        "contact_method": p.get("business_contact_method"),
        "city": p.get("city_name"),
    }

print(creator_record("natgeo"))

Extracting a work email from the bio — the legitimate path

Creators who want inbound mail usually publish it themselves. Your job is to read what they chose to publish, not to guess a private address. Parse the bio and the bio link:

import re

EMAIL_RE = re.compile(r"[\w.+-]+@[\w-]+\.[\w.-]+")
URL_RE = re.compile(r"https?://\S+|[\w-]+\.(?:com|co|io|net|link)/\S*")

def contact_signals(profile):
    bio = profile.get("bio") or ""
    signals = {
        "emails": EMAIL_RE.findall(bio),
        "links": URL_RE.findall(bio.replace("\n", " ")),
        "dm_instruction": bool(re.search(r"\bdm\b|direct message", bio, re.I)),
        "external_url": profile.get("link"),
    }
    # The bio link is a first-class signal even when the bio has no address.
    return signals

Two practical rules. First, only treat an address found in the bio as usable when it is clearly published for business contact — a “for collabs: [email protected]” is a standing invitation, whereas a personal address appearing incidentally is not. Second, always follow external_url: for creators represented by an agency, that link is usually the fastest correct route, and mail sent to an agency gets answered faster than a cold DM.

Following the link one hop

A media kit or Linktree page is a normal web page. Fetch it yourself and look for a contact route. That is ordinary web scraping of a page the creator published for exactly this purpose — not a bypass of Instagram’s contact model — and it is where most of your real coverage will come from.

What people build with this

Influencer outreach lists

Filter a candidate list by follower_count band, is_verified, and category, then pull external_url as the outreach destination. A CRM row becomes: handle, name, size, category, city, contact route.

CRM enrichment

You already have a creator in your CRM; you want to know whether they have since added a business category, changed their bio link, or moved city. Re-run the lookup and diff. At 1 credit each, refreshing 500 creators is 500 credits.

Market mapping

Pull the same fields across a niche — for example 200 accounts in a category — and aggregate on category and city to see how a market is distributed. This uses only fields that reliably exist, so the output is not full of empty columns.

Honest limitations

• No email, no phone. Structured contact fields are filtered from responses by design. There is no flag or plan that re-enables them here.
• No follower or following lists. This API returns the follower count, not the list of individual followers. That is covered on the followers API page and in the followers export guide.
• Category is frequently null. As the real example above shows, do not depend on it.
• Location fields are business fields. They exist for business accounts that published them; a personal creator account will usually have none.
• Bio text is unstructured. A regex finds what looks like an address; it cannot tell you whether the address is current, personal, or intended for you.
• Private accounts return nothing. And collecting personal data carries legal duties. Have a lawful basis, honour opt-outs, and follow the platform’s terms.