Instagram Explore

Explore starts from what you engaged with. In Instagram's own example, after you like a dumpling chef's photos it looks at who else likes them and what other accounts those people are interested in ¹, so you may see gyoza and dim sum without it knowing what each post is about ². Meta says retrieval uses collaborative filtering and personalized PageRank, and fetches up to 1,500 posts ³⁴.

Instagram lists Explore's signals in rough order: information about the post, then your activity, your history with the poster, and information about the poster ¹. A post's popularity counts much more here than in Feed or Stories ². The top 100 candidates go to a final model, and the actions it predicts most are likes, saves and shares ³⁴. Instagram ranking sets this order beside Feed, Stories and Instagram Reels.

Because Explore recommends people you have not chosen to follow, Instagram adds Recommendation Guidelines on top of its Community Standards ¹. Posts that break them stay on Instagram but are not recommended, for example violence, or the use of tobacco, vaping products or pharmaceutical drugs ²³. Since April 2026, accounts that mostly re-upload others' work are not shown where Instagram recommends content ⁴.