Find the most viewed Reels on any profile

Why look at one creator's most viewed Reels?

The all-time most viewed Reels on Instagram are mostly celebrities, athletes and huge brands. They're fun to look at, but they won't tell a fitness coach, a recipe account or a software company what to post next.

A creator's own most viewed Reels will. They show which topics, hooks and formats worked for an audience close to yours, from an account with a similar size and style. Do this for five or ten creators in your niche and patterns show up quickly.

How do you find a creator's most viewed Reels?

Instagram shows the view count on every Reel in a profile's Reels tab, but the grid is always newest first and you can't sort it. You can scroll and compare numbers by hand, which works for a small account and takes minutes for a large one.

With SortViral, a free Chrome extension, it's a click:

1. Add SortViral to Chrome. It's free, with no sign-up and no post limit.
2. Open the creator's Reels tab on instagram.com, for example instagram.com/mkbhd/reels/.
3. Click Views in the bar above the grid. The Reels re-sort in place, most viewed first, while the rest of the profile loads in the background. In our test, 112 Reels loaded in about 10 seconds.
4. Click Outlier to see which Reels did best compared with the creator's usual.

The full walkthrough, including the Posts tab, is in how to sort Instagram Reels by views.

Most viewed or most unusual?

Sorting by views shows the biggest totals. For a large creator, the top of that list is often just their normal reach plus a little luck.

The Outlier sort asks a better question: which Reels beat this creator's usual? SortViral divides each Reel's views by the median of the creator's 30 most recent posts, leaving out pinned posts and posts under 3 days old. A Reel at 12× its creator's usual is a stronger signal than one at 1.2×, even if the second has more views.

A real example: MKBHD has 5.3M followers and a usual of 2.6M views across his latest 12 Reels. His Reel from 4 August 2026 got 32,010,675 views, 12.1× his usual (public data, 6 October 2026). That's the one worth studying.

Each outlier score shows its baseline, for example "12× · median of 12 Reels", so you can see how many posts it was compared against.

How do you find a creator's most liked Instagram posts?

Not every post has views. On Instagram, photos and carousels don't show a view count, so likes are the useful number for them.

1. Open the creator's Posts tab on instagram.com.
2. Use the type filter in the SortViral bar to show Reels, Carousels or Photos.
3. Sort. Reels are scored on views. Photos and carousels are scored on likes, so their outlier score compares a post's likes with the creator's usual.

Hover any post to see its views (for Reels), likes, comments, outlier score, engagement, views per day and posting date. If you want likes and comments as a rate, the Instagram engagement rate calculator explains how it's worked out.

One caveat: creators can hide the like count on their posts. When a post hides it, you can't see it on Instagram either.

What is the most liked post on Instagram?

According to Guinness World Records, the most liked image post on Instagram is Lionel Messi's photo of himself lifting the FIFA World Cup trophy after Argentina won the 2022 final. It had 75,471,947 likes when Guinness verified it on 24 March 2023. The number may have changed since.

How do you find the most viewed Reels on a topic?

Sometimes you want the best Reels about a subject, not from one person. SortViral adds the same bar to Instagram keyword search results and hashtag pages. Search for a topic, click Views or Outlier, and the results re-sort in place.

It also works on your Saved posts, so you can sort what you've saved by how well each post did.

How do you keep track of top Reels across many creators?

Checking one profile at a time gets slow if you follow a whole niche.

• Watchlist saves creators and scans them all at once for their biggest outliers in a date range, such as the last 30 days.
• Bookmarks keep individual Reels you want to come back to.
• CSV export saves every loaded post with its numbers.
• Copy for AI copies the top posts with their captions and numbers, ready to paste into an AI chat and ask what they have in common.

For the same thing on TikTok, see most viewed TikTok videos.

Frequently asked questions