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During the past year, research conducted by Forbes estimated that 1 in 4 influencers have purchased fake followers at some point. Even if you haven't, you may have bots as followers or a remnant of inactive accounts in your follower lists.
Fake followers on Instagram can harm other metrics on your profile, such as your engagement rate or the true growth of your account. To address this, tools to spot and remove fake followers on Instagram are the best solution.
These tools will help you clean your profile of fake followers, give your account an accurate view, and boost your presence with the Instagram algorithm.
The Top 5 tools to spot and remove take followers on Instagram are:
Tools to spot fake followers on Instagram are websites or apps designed to identify suspicious, inactive, or inauthentic accounts following Instagram profiles. These tools help users, creators, and brands ensure that their audience is real, engaged, and aligned with their goals.
Fake followers on Instagram aren't just bots; they can include various types of low-quality accounts. Here is a quick overview:
Tools to spot fake followers will detect all of these types of accounts. They're crucial for protecting your brand's reputation, improving engagement metrics, and ensuring that your community is made up of real people who actually care about your content.
Fake followers dilute the credibility of your Instagram presence. They don’t engage, don’t buy, and don’t help you grow. If you're an influencer, brands might see a high follower count but low engagement rate, which is a red flag.
For brands, fake followers skew campaign metrics, leading to poor ROI. They can also affect your account’s algorithm performance—Instagram prioritizes content with high real engagement.
Spotting fake followers manually involves looking for suspicious behavior: no profile picture, no posts, generic usernames, and unusually high following-to-follower ratios.
Engagement is another clue—if someone has 10,000 followers but only gets 30 likes per post, something’s off. Fortunately, tools can automate this process and give you a more detailed breakdown.
There are several characteristics you should consider when choosing a fake followers detection tool for Instagram. Here are the key criteria to help you find the best option:
To properly identify fake followers on Instagram, the best platforms often use AI-powered technology to analyze account behavior. These tools can distinguish between bots, inactive users, and suspicious engagement patterns. Many of them offer a detailed breakdown of which followers may be fake, inactive, or ghost followers, giving you the option to review or remove them manually.
Some tools are transparent about their error margins and detection methods. The more data they provide, like profile activity, content patterns, and engagement history, the more confidently you can decide if a follower is authentic or not.
Instagram moves fast, and so should your tools. Some platforms offer great insights, but their reports are based on outdated data, which can lead to missed red flags. That’s why real-time monitoring is key: it allows you to detect fake followers as they appear and respond quickly.
Of course, historical data is also useful to track growth and trends over time. The ideal tool will balance both, offering fresh insights while giving you the big picture.
Not everyone managing an Instagram account is a tech expert, and they shouldn’t need to be. That’s why tools with a clean, easy-to-navigate interface are essential. If a platform is too complicated, chances are you won’t use it consistently.
A good fake follower detection tool for Instagram should be intuitive, with a dashboard that’s easy to read and reports that don’t require you to be a data analyst to understand.
While the focus here is on Instagram, many creators and businesses operate across multiple social media platforms. A tool that also works for TikTok, X (Twitter), or YouTube can help you monitor your entire online presence in one place.
Multi-platform tools are also helpful for spotting repeat offenders, fake accounts that follow you on multiple platforms, so you can take broader action to clean your audience.
Price is an important factor, especially for creators or small businesses just starting out. That’s why tools that offer free plans or low-cost options are a big plus. Many platforms offer basic detection features for free in exchange for signing up with your email or connecting your Instagram account, and they don’t hide fees behind paywalls.
We recommend starting with one of these free tools to get a feel for how they work, and then deciding if a premium version is worth the investment as your account grows.
Pricing: Free
Reviews: N/A (Built into the app)
Best For: Anyone who wants a quick and manual way to remove fake followers without third-party apps
Free Trial: It is free.
Instagram itself gives you basic tools to manage your follower list manually. While it doesn’t offer a full-fledged fake follower detection system, you can spot and remove suspicious followers on your own with a little investigation.
There’s no automated detection inside Instagram, but you can look for signs like:
You can also compare your average engagement to your follower count—if your posts are getting way less engagement than expected, fake followers could be dragging your stats down.
To remove fake followers manually:
You can also block them to prevent future interactions. This is a good method if you only need to clean up a few fake accounts and don’t want to install extra tools.
If the platform doesn’t provide an automatic way of removing the fake followers from Instagram, this is the process that you would have to go through. As you can see, it is pretty straightforward and you can have it done in a couple of hours. The best way is to choose one day of the month (if you see suspicious spikes in growth and low engagement rate) to do this task.
Pricing: Free Plan Available. Pro plans start at $19 per month
Reviews: 5.0 stars
Best For: Content Creators
Free Trial: Free plan available
Creator Hero is a platform designed to help content creators, including Instagram Influencers, monetize their influence by building custom storefronts, earning commissions through affiliate marketing, and establishing brand partnerships. It provides tools to create personalized shops, manage products, and track earnings, all aimed at enhancing revenue streams for creators. The tool to spot and remove fake followers on Instagram is available for free, while only specific additional features require payment.
Creator Hero audits Instagram accounts and analyzes audience authenticity. It flags bots, inactive users, mass followers, and suspicious engagement patterns. You’ll get an overall authenticity score and breakdowns like engagement rate, follower quality, and audience demographics to help spot fake followers quickly.
Creator Hero is a detection tool only. It doesn't provide a way to remove fake followers directly. Once you identify the fake accounts, you'll need to go to your Instagram account and remove them manually or use a dedicated fake follower removal app.
Creator Hero is a fantastic platform for both established influencers and those just getting started. Its free plans and tools make it stand out from other similar platforms, and it's specifically targeted at content creators. It's easy to use, so you won't need any learning curve or adaptation time to understand the comprehensive reports that Creator Hero provides.
Pricing: Starting from $29/month up to $55/month
Reviews: 4.4/5.0 (Capterra)
Best For: Content creators and brands who want to remove fake followers and bots from their social media accounts.
Free Trial: Yes, 14 days
Spamguard is a platform available as a phone app or website that analyzes Instagram profiles to identify and remove fake followers. It can be used by brands or content creators and provides additional protection against potential fraud and spam.
SpamGuard runs a complete audit of your followers and categorizes them into fake, inactive, or spam accounts. You get a detailed dashboard to review before taking action.
It lets you mass-remove fake followers automatically or manually after review. You can schedule periodic cleanups too.
If you want to find and remove fake Instagram followers en masse, then Spamguard is for you. Keep in mind that the platform does this automatically once you permit it, so you can't manually select which accounts you don't want to delete. So, there's a risk that some real followers will be lost in the process.
Pricing: From $50 to $300 depending on your amount of followers
Reviews: 4.3/5.0 (Google Play)
Best For: Content creators or brands looking to remove fake followers from their Instagram accounts.
Free Trial: No
Ghost Follower App is available for phones or in its web format. It allows you to detect ghost (fake, bots and spam) followers on Instagram and remove them automatically. It is available worldwide, for brands and content creators.
The app scans your account to find followers who never interact with your content (no likes/comments). These are likely fake or ghost followers.
Once detected, the app gives you the option to unfollow or block these users in bulk directly from the app interface.
If you're looking for a platform that automatically removes fake and "ghost" followers, this one will be useful for you. You must agree to grant access permissions to your account, which are a bit stricter than those on other platforms.
Pricing: Starts at $349/month
Reviews: 4.7/5.0 (Shopify Apps)
Best For: Agencies and brands managing multiple influencer campaigns
Free Trial: Yes
Influencer Hero is a full-stack influencer marketing platform built for brands and agencies, with tools that include outreach automation, campaign tracking, and influencer analytics. One of its standout features is fake follower detection, which helps brands evaluate the authenticity of influencers before investing in partnerships.
To identify fake followers with Influencer Hero, simply input the Instagram handle of the influencer you're researching. The platform runs a deep scan of the account and provides insights such as:
These metrics help you make data-driven decisions about whether or not to move forward with a partnership.
Influencer Hero does not offer tools to remove fake followers directly from Instagram. It is a detection-only tool. However, once you identify suspicious accounts using its reports, you can manually remove them through Instagram's native interface.
If you want to spot the exact amount of fake followers on your profile, and get an overall audit of your account, Influencer Hero is a great choice. It doesn’t remove the fake followers because some platforms don’t get that permission from Instagram, but you can still do it manually.
Removing fake followers on Instagram is essential for maintaining a healthy engagement rate and building a trustworthy online presence. Whether you’re a content creator, influencer, or brand, using the right tools—like Creator Hero, Spamguard, and others—can help you spot and eliminate bots, inactive users, and ghost followers.
These platforms offer AI-powered insights, real-time analytics, and easy-to-use features to keep your account clean and authentic. Start with a free tool, assess your needs, and invest in growth that’s 100% real.
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