61% of Instagram creators with 1,000 or more followers have a link in their bio. We read the bios of a 2% block sample of public Instagram accounts in Virev's crawl, 284,248 creators, plus every TikTok and YouTube creator we crawl. Linktree is the one tool most creators use, at 11.5% of all Instagram creators. Few creators write an email in the bio, 6.9% on Instagram, 11.7% on TikTok and 16.3% on YouTube.
When we asked an OpenAI model on October 19 what share of creators use a link in bio, it said there is no reliable number. The figure most pages repeat comes from Influencers Club, which found link-in-bio tools on 31 million of 100 million Instagram profiles and gave Linktree a 79.95% share. Its sample counts every profile, not only creators. For emails, the numbers that come up are 12 of 43 accounts from a Provitgo test and 39% from Click Analytic, which counts a business email anywhere on the profile. This page counts creators by size, on three platforms, and the CSV is at the end.
60.9%
Link in bio
84.8%
Linktree's share
6.9%
Email in the bio
How many Instagram creators have a link in bio
Instagram lets an account show up to 5 links in its bio. We count an account as having a link in bio when Instagram lists at least one.
| Followers | Creators | Link in bio | Email in bio | Neither |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1K-10K | 210,935 | 57.2% | 5.1% | 41.4% |
| 10K-100K | 59,435 | 70.9% | 10.2% | 26.5% |
| 100K-500K | 11,083 | 74.1% | 18.7% | 21.6% |
| 500K-1M | 1,643 | 75.7% | 24.3% | 19.4% |
| 1M+ | 1,152 | 74.9% | 25.1% | 18.8% |
| All creators | 284,248 | 60.9% | 6.9% | 37.3% |
Small creators link out the least. 57.2% of creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers have a bio link, against 70.9% at 10,000 to 100,000 and about 75% above that. 21.0% of creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers list 2 or more links, and only 2.2% of all creators fill all 5 link slots. Brands, businesses and media accounts link out more than creators, at 79.7%.
Which link-in-bio tools creators use
| Tool | Creators in the sample | Share of tool links |
|---|---|---|
| Linktree | 32,802 | 84.8% |
| Beacons | 1,150 | 3.0% |
| Bio.site or Bio.link | 1,002 | 2.6% |
| Later Linkin.bio | 716 | 1.9% |
| Other tools | 540 | 1.4% |
| Lnk.Bio | 481 | 1.2% |
| Milkshake | 451 | 1.2% |
| Taplink | 449 | 1.2% |
| Carrd | 296 | 0.8% |
| Stan | 202 | 0.5% |
Linktree has 84.8% of creator links that go to a link-in-bio tool. Influencers Club found 79.95% across all Instagram profiles, so the two counts agree that Linktree leads by a wide margin. Beacons, Bio.site and Later's Linkin.bio each hold 3% or less. Stan, which sells a creator store, shows up on 0.07% of all creators and 0.43% of creators with 500,000 to 1 million followers.
At most 13.6% of Instagram creators link to any link-in-bio tool. Most bio links go somewhere else.
How this compares with 2022
In May 2022, Business Insider published HypeAuditor's count of link-in-bio tools on 1.7 million Instagram creator accounts in the US, Australia, the UK and Germany. Our 2026 sample covers creators with 1,000+ followers in every country, so the two counts do not measure the same group.
| Share of creators | HypeAuditor, 2022 | Virev, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Any link in bio | 55% | 60.9% |
| Linktree | 15.73% | 11.54% |
| YouTube | 9.22% | 8.85% |
| 2.09% | 2.07% | |
| Later Linkin.bio | 0.96% | 0.25% |
| Beacons | 0.74% | 0.40% |
| TikTok | 0.72% | 2.59% |
| Spotify | 0.62% | 1.36% |
| Milkshake | 0.61% | 0.16% |
| Carrd | 0.44% | 0.10% |
Linktree is on 11.54% of creators in our sample, against 15.73% in HypeAuditor's. Later's Linkin.bio, Milkshake and Carrd show up about a quarter as often in our sample as in HypeAuditor's, and Beacons about half as often. Links straight to TikTok and Spotify show up more often. Instagram added up to 5 bio links in April 2023, so a creator can now list several links without a separate page, which may be part of the reason.
Where Instagram bio links point
After Linktree, the most common bio links go to YouTube (8.8% of creators), WhatsApp (4.4%) and TikTok (2.6%). Shopping links are rare. Amazon storefronts, ShopMy and LTK appear on at most 0.5% of creators, and on at most 1.8% of creators with 100,000 to 500,000 followers.
How many creators write an email in their bio
| Followers | TikTok | YouTube | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K-10K | 5.1% | 4.7% | 6.3% |
| 10K-100K | 10.2% | 11.9% | 14.9% |
| 100K-500K | 18.7% | 18.4% | 20.6% |
| 500K-1M | 24.3% | 23.4% | 23.0% |
| 1M+ | 25.1% | 29.3% | 24.9% |
| All creators | 6.9% | 11.7% | 16.3% |
About 1 in 20 creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers writes an email in the bio, on all three platforms. Above 1 million followers it is 1 in 4. Among Instagram creators with 10,000 or more followers, 12.0% write one in the bio. Click Analytic gives 39% for the same group, counting a business email anywhere on the profile, which can include the contact button that our data does not read.
For a brand, that means most small creators have no written email. 41.4% of Instagram creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers show neither a link nor an email. For them, a direct message or the contact button is the only way in.
YouTube channel links
| Subscribers | Channels | Any link | TikTok | Patreon | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1K-10K | 9,919 | 22.9% | 4.0% | 3.0% | 0.6% |
| 10K-100K | 11,176 | 47.2% | 11.1% | 10.2% | 3.2% |
| 100K-500K | 8,805 | 69.9% | 25.5% | 18.7% | 6.8% |
| 500K-1M | 3,458 | 79.4% | 34.0% | 23.4% | 6.5% |
| 1M+ | 6,325 | 84.2% | 44.1% | 28.7% | 4.2% |
| All creators | 39,683 | 54.9% | 19.8% | 14.4% | 3.8% |
YouTube channels with 1,000 to 10,000 subscribers rarely list links, at 22.9%, while 84.2% of channels above 1 million list at least one. Large channels link to Facebook (44.1%) and TikTok (28.7%) more than to a link-in-bio tool, and only 1.6% of YouTube creators link to Linktree.
What to do with this
- If you are a creator under 10,000 followers, add an email to your bio, because about 95% of creators your size do not, and a brand can only email you if it finds an address.
- If you need more than the 5 links Instagram allows, a link-in-bio page holds the rest, and Linktree has 84.8% of the creator links that go to such a page.
- If you are a brand, expect to find a written email for about 1 in 10 Instagram creators with 10,000 to 100,000 followers. The Instagram email finder looks up the published business email of a public account.
- To find creators by size, niche and country before you contact them, use Virev creator search, which covers 180M+ creators.
For how to find a creator's published email by hand, see find an Instagram creator's published business email.
How we measured, and what can be wrong
- The Instagram figures come from a 2% block sample of the pages of Virev's Instagram account table, read with Postgres
TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM (2), which picks whole table pages at random rather than single accounts. The sample has 308,164 public accounts with 1,000 or more followers, out of 15,360,494 such accounts in the table. - We removed accounts that Virev's profiles label as a brand, business, media outlet, organization or government, and accounts whose Instagram category names a business, which leaves 284,248 creators. Profile labels exist for 5,571 of the sampled accounts, so the category filter does most of this work.
- A link counts when Instagram lists it among the account's bio links. A tool counts when a link's address matches the tool's domain, such as linktr.ee for Linktree.
- An email counts when the bio text contains an address. A hand check of 17 bios that matched found 17 real email addresses. Instagram's contact button and email hidden behind a link-in-bio page are not counted, so the share of creators with a reachable email is higher than these numbers.
- TikTok bios in our data do not include the bio link field, so TikTok appears only in the email table.
- YouTube counts the links and description on the channel's About page, for all 39,683 creator channels with 1,000 or more subscribers that Virev crawls.
- The sample is the set of accounts Virev crawls, which leans toward accounts that brands search for, and is not a random draw from all of Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
Download the data
The tables are in one CSV: link-in-bio-statistics-2026.csv. Each row is one group in one table, with the share of accounts that have a link, 2 or more links, 5 links, an email in the bio, and a link to each site we track. The tables are all_accounts, creators, creators_by_tier, creators_10k_plus, organizations and link_in_bio_tool_share. Please cite "Virev, October 2026" and link this page.
