The old brand pitch problem: you send your Reels views and engagement rate to a brand manager, and they have no idea what to do with those numbers. 12% engagement sounds impressive. Is it? Compared to what? You had no answer, because Instagram never gave you one.

That’s what Instagram Competitive Insights changes. Rolling out to professional accounts in May 2026, the feature lets you benchmark your own performance against comparable accounts natively inside Instagram (no third-party tool needed). Pair it with Shareable Insights (a PDF analytics export coming to the Instagram Edits app), and the brand deal pitch looks pretty different than it did six months ago.

Not hype. A real capability shift for the creator doing their own outreach.

What’s New at a Glance

Feature	What It Does	Where to Find It
Competitive Insights	Benchmark your performance vs. up to 10 comparable accounts	Professional Dashboard → Competitive Insights
Shareable Insights	Export your analytics as a downloadable PDF	Instagram Edits app

Who benefits most: Creators with 10K–75K followers pitching brands independently Less impactful for: Sub-5K accounts (audience size remains the bigger objection) and large creators with agency representation

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What Is Instagram Competitive Insights?

Instagram Competitive Insights is a native benchmarking tool inside the Professional Dashboard that compares your account’s performance against a manually selected set of up to 10 comparable accounts. Metrics covered include follower growth, posting frequency, Reels reach, and boosted post activity — giving your numbers context without needing a third-party analytics platform.

You find it under Professional Dashboard → Competitive Insights. The rollout is gradual, so not every professional account has it yet as of May 2026. If you don’t see it, update the app and check back.

The feature shows you where you rank against peers — not in an abstract algorithmic score, but in the actual metrics that brand managers ask about in initial conversations: growth trajectory, content cadence, Reels performance.

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Why Benchmark Data Changes the Pitch

Every creator eventually runs into the same wall: your numbers are your numbers. Without context, they’re nearly meaningless to a brand.

“My Reels average 14K views” is a sentence that means different things depending on your niche, your follower count, and what your competitors are doing. An experienced brand manager who buys a lot of influencer placements knows this. The creator pitching them usually can’t prove their case because Instagram has never made competitive context visible natively.

Competitive Insights closes that gap. Here’s the actual workflow:

Select benchmark accounts deliberately. Don’t benchmark against the biggest names in your niche. Pick accounts closest to your follower count that are visibly active and landing brand deals. You want to show you outperform true peers — not that you’re trailing a creator with 10x your audience.

Wait for meaningful data. A single snapshot isn’t reliable. Give it one to two weeks before pulling comparisons into a pitch. You want a data window, not a moment.

Frame the comparison in your outreach. Instead of “my Reels average 15K views,” you can say “my Reels average 15K views — roughly 40% above comparable accounts in my niche.” That second sentence does actual work. It answers the brand’s implicit question before they can ask it.

The current limitation: according to Social Media Today’s reporting on the rollout, Competitive Insights focuses on awareness-level signals: follower growth, posting frequency, Reels reach. Deeper behavioral data like saves, shares, or click-throughs aren’t included yet. For most initial pitches, that’s sufficient. Those are the headline metrics a brand uses when evaluating a creator’s reach potential.

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Shareable Insights: The PDF That Does the Work

Shareable Insights is coming to the Instagram Edits app — Instagram’s mobile video editor with collaboration features built for brand workflows. As Lindsey Gamble reported when the feature was announced, creators will be able to export account-level and post/campaign-level data as a downloadable PDF. Metrics included: Reels views, likes, comments, reposts, shares, and saves.

What this replaces is the patchwork. Most creators doing their own brand pitching have been stitching together screenshots from Instagram Insights, formatting them into a Canva deck, and calling it a media kit. That works, but it carries an invisible credibility tax. A brand manager who reviews a lot of pitches knows the difference between a self-assembled screenshot deck and official platform data.

An authenticated PDF export from Instagram carries weight that a Canva template doesn’t.

What it doesn’t replace: a real media kit. Analytics are one section, not the whole document. You still need your audience demographics, your content niche, your past brand work, and your rates. The Shareable Insights PDF gives you the credibility layer — the rest of the pitch structure is still on you.

Think of it as the difference between saying “here’s a screenshot of my stats” and “here’s an official analytics export.” Same underlying data, different presentation, different signal to the person reading it.

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Story Links: The Conversion Tool Smaller Creators Were Denied

One more tool already in your arsenal: Story links have been open to all accounts since 2021, when Instagram replaced the Swipe Up feature with the Link Sticker and dropped the 10,000-follower minimum. That gate has been gone for years — which matters for brand deals if you haven’t been building it into your proposals.

This matters for brand deals because link tracking is how brands measure whether a sponsorship actually worked. A creator can show all the engagement metrics they want; the ROI question that determines whether a brand comes back is “how many people clicked and converted?” Without Story links, creators under 10K couldn’t participate in that conversation at all. The bio link was the only option. One extra tap, substantially fewer people following through.

With link stickers open to everyone, a smaller creator can now build a brand deal proposal around tracked link performance. Not just “I’ll post a Reel and two Stories” but “the Stories will include a direct tracked link — here’s how we’ll measure the conversion.” That conversation leads to repeat deals. Brands don’t repeat deals with creators they can’t measure.

The caveat: link access doesn’t produce clicks on its own. Click-through rate still depends on audience engagement and how well the Story drives intent. The link sticker is infrastructure. You still need the content to make people want to tap it.

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How to Build the Pitch with All Three Features

What to do before reaching out

1. Add 5–10 genuinely comparable accounts to Competitive Insights. Similar follower count, same niche, actively posting.
2. Let it run for one to two weeks so you have a real performance window, not a one-day snapshot.
3. Identify where you outperform peers. Lead with your strongest metric — Reels reach, follower growth velocity, engagement rate.
4. Update the Edits app and look for Shareable Insights in the analytics section. Pull a 30-day export when it’s available on your account.

What to put in the pitch

• Open with benchmark context. “At my follower count, accounts in my niche typically see X — my last 30 days averaged Y” is a sentence most creator pitches never include.
• Attach the Shareable Insights PDF as a separate document. Not inline, not screenshotted into the email body. A clean attachment signals you know how to communicate with a professional.
• Propose link-tracked Stories as part of the deliverable scope. Even if the brand doesn’t ask for it, including it signals you’re thinking about their measurable outcome, not just your content.

What to send after the deal closes

A wrap report using the same analytics format. The post-campaign report is what earns you the next deal. Brands that feel informed and measured come back. Brands that get a final Reel link and silence don’t.

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The Media Kit Reality Check

Creator advice loves to treat the media kit as the leverage point. “Build a better media kit, land more deals.” That’s only half the equation.

The actual bottleneck for most mid-tier creators isn’t media kit quality. It’s cold outreach volume and relevance. A polished media kit sent to the wrong brand at the wrong time does nothing. These Instagram tools improve what happens after a brand is already interested — they make your case stronger once you have someone’s attention.

If you’re not doing consistent outreach yet, the creator business diversification breakdown covers how to structure the pitch pipeline before worrying about the pitch deck quality.

If you’re pitching but not converting, the weak point is usually the benchmark problem. You’re asking brands to trust numbers they can’t interpret. Competitive Insights gives them the context they need to say yes.

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What These Tools Don’t Fix

Competitive Insights requires manual account selection. Instagram doesn’t auto-populate comparable accounts. If you pick accounts that are too large or too small, the comparison hurts you. Knowing which accounts to benchmark against is a real skill — it requires understanding your niche well enough to identify genuine peers.

Shareable Insights is still rolling out. Not every account has the PDF export as of May 2026. If it’s not in your Edits app yet, update the app and check back. Meta has been releasing Edits features in waves.

Competitive Insights shows what, not why. You can see that a peer account posts five Reels a week and has faster follower growth. You can’t see whether the growth is from volume, content quality, a single viral post, or paid promotion. The feature gives you hypotheses, not diagnoses.

Smaller audiences still have a ceiling. A sub-5K creator with perfect benchmark data and a beautiful PDF is still going to face the reach objection from most brands. These tools improve the pitch; they don’t overcome a fundamental scale gap.

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Who This Changes the Most

The creator profile this directly affects: 10K–75K followers, posting consistently, doing their own brand outreach, trying to move up the rate card by proving their value over accounts with more followers but less engagement.

For creators working with influencer marketing platforms or agencies, the infrastructure for this already exists through dedicated tools. If you’re working with a platform like Devotion for brand matching, the native Instagram analytics are supplementary at best — those platforms already have benchmarking built in.

The independent creator who handles everything from content to contracts is the one who gains the most. A native benchmark tool and a native PDF export remove two pieces of work that previously required either a third-party subscription or a lot of manual assembly.

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The Platform Logic Behind All of This

Instagram has spent 2026 adding tools that make the platform more self-contained for professional creators. Retention heatmaps for Reels helped with content optimization. The Edits app’s collaboration features addressed brand revision workflow. Competitive Insights and Shareable Insights close the brand pitching loop.

The meta-strategy is readable: if creators can benchmark, pitch, revise, and report all within Instagram’s ecosystem, they have less reason to build their workflows on third-party platforms that give them platform-agnostic data. It’s as much a retention play for Instagram as it is a creator-tool push.

Whether tying your pitching infrastructure to a single platform’s ecosystem is the right call depends on how diversified your content strategy is. For Instagram-first creators, the consolidation is clearly useful. For a broader context on where Instagram fits in a multi-platform creator business strategy, that’s a separate question worth thinking through.

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Start Here

If you’re pitching brand deals right now:

1. Open your Professional Dashboard today and look for Competitive Insights. If it’s there, add five comparable accounts.
2. Update the Edits app. Look for a Shareable Insights or analytics export option.
3. Your next pitch should include one line of benchmark context — even a rough one. “Creators at my size in this niche typically see X, I’m averaging Y” is enough to start.
4. Make Story links with tracked URLs a standard deliverable in every proposal going forward.

The pitch workflow just got better tooling. The creators who adjust first get the early advantage in conversations that are already happening.