Creating a Creator Discovery Search

Overview

Follow this article to learn how to create a Creator Discovery search and use audience and creator filters to identify creators that align with your campaign goals.

Creator Discovery is a search engine within Demand Intelligence that helps you find creators across Instagram and TikTok. By applying filters to both the creator and their audience, you can generate a ranked list of creators, analyze individual accounts in more detail, and save searches for future use.

Creating a Creator Discovery search

To start a search, go to New Report and pick Creator Discovery as the creation method. You'll land on the filter panel, that's where you scope your search before hitting Apply.

Channels supported:

Creator Discovery currently covers two channels:

Instagram: Location filters drill down all the way to city level, both for creator and audience.
TikTok: Location is country-level only, both for creator and audience.

Filters at a glance:

Creator Discovery splits filters into two panels: Audience filters (about the creator's followers) and Creator filters (about the creator themselves). Use them together to scope your search.

How filter signals are sourced:

Several filters like Location, Gender, Age and Language, both for creators and for their audiences, are directional signals, inferred from public signals (profile pictures and recent selfies via photo analysis, names, bios, post captions, hashtags and post location tags).

How audience filters work:

Each audience filter has its own threshold: a creator only appears in your results if a minimum share of their audience matches the criterion. The thresholds vary by filter and are set to balance precision and result volume:

Location: At least 5% of the audience based in the selected location.
Gender: At least 50% of followers match the selected gender.
Language: At least 20% of followers match the selected language.
Age range: At least 25% of followers fall in the selected age bracket.

Keep this in mind when combining several audience filters, they stack up quickly and can narrow your pool of creators very fast.

Audience filters

These filters describe the creator's followers. Apply them when what matters is who is on the receiving end, not who is posting.

Filter	What it does
Location	Filter creators whose audience is in a given country (TikTok and Instagram) or city (Instagram only). Each follower's location is estimated from post tags, bio language and recent captions. A creator enters the results when at least 5% of their audience is based in the selected location.
Gender	Filter by the dominant gender in the creator's audience. Audience gender is estimated from profile pictures and recent selfies (photo analysis), names, bios and language. A creator enters the results when at least 50% of their followers match the selected gender.
Language	Filter by the main language spoken by the audience. Detected from each follower's bio and captions of recent posts. A creator enters the results when at least 20% of their followers match the selected language.
Age	Filter by the dominant age range of the audience. Audience age is estimated from profile pictures and recent selfies (photo analysis), names, bios and language. A creator enters the results when at least 25% of their followers fall in the selected bracket.
Lookalike audience	Seed the search with one or more accounts whose audience matters to you, and surface creators whose followers also follow similar pages to those seeds. Useful in two directions: (1) to keep targeting an audience that's already worked well for you in the past, or (2) to diversify away from it — and learn which creators to avoid if you're trying to reach a new audience.

Creator filters

These filters describe the creators themselves, what they post, where they live, the size and shape of their following.

Filter	What it does
Keywords	Find creators whose posts include these terms in captions, mentions or hashtags. Type a term and press Enter to add it as a tag, combine as many as you need. For a streaming launch, you might add terms like tv, streaming, reviews, series.
Bio	Find creators whose bio or full name includes these terms. Useful when you want a self-declared signal, e.g., creators who literally describe themselves as a stylist, foodie or gamer.
Location	Where the creator themselves is based, up to 20 countries or cities. Estimated from post location tags, bio language and captions of recent posts (the latest 150, or more if from the last two months). Instagram supports country and city level; TikTok supports country level only. Independent from where their audience is.
Gender	Filter by the gender of the creator. Estimated from profile picture, recent selfies (photo analysis), name, bio and language signals.
Language	Filter by the language the creator posts in. Detected from the creator's bio and captions of recent posts.
Age	Filter by the creator's estimated age range. Estimated from profile picture, recent selfies (photo analysis), name, bio and language signals.
Followers	Filter by the size of the creator's following. Note: the largest bracket available is more than 1M followers, we don't go more granular beyond that. If you need a hard cap above 1M (e.g., under 5M), that's not possible from inside the tool today.
Average likes	Average likes per post over the last two months (up to 500 posts). For infrequent creators, the calculation may include up to 10 older posts. Useful when you care less about raw audience size and more about how active that audience actually is. Pair it with Engagement rate for a sharper performance lens.
Engagement rate	How active and engaged the audience is, as a percentage. Calculated as Average likes ÷ Followers, and inherits the same two-month window as Average likes. For most campaigns, a threshold of >2% is a reasonable bar for solid performance.
Lookalike creators	Seed the search with one or more accounts that perform well for you, and surface creators whose interest areas overlap with them. Similarity is based on how much the topics each creator covers in their content overlap. Use this to scale what's already working.
Last post	Find creators who have posted within a set time window. Useful to filter out dormant accounts, set to 1 month to keep only creators who are actively publishing. Applies to both Instagram and TikTok.
Partnerships	Instagram: Add one or more brands to find creators who have collaborated with them, or select Any for creators with at least one sponsored post. TikTok: Find creators with at least one sponsored post for any brand.

Note:

Before applying location, decide whether you care about where the creator lives or where their followers are. A creator based in Miami with a LATAM audience is a completely different play than a creator based in Miami with a US, English-speaking audience, same city, different opportunity. Both signals are inferred (see “How filter signals are sourced” above), so combining Audience location with Audience language often gives sharper results than location alone.

Saving a Search as a Report

Once you are satisfied with your search results, you can save the search as a report.

When saving a report, you can:

Assign a report name
Select how many creators to include
Review the applied filters
Export a CSV file

Saved reports can be accessed later from your reports list.

Managing Saved Reports

Saved reports can be:

Renamed
Deleted
Cloned
Shared publicly
Downloaded as CSV files

You can also review the report definition at any time to see which filters were used.