How to See a Competitor's Best Shorts and Reels (Without Logging In)

You can't log into someone else's TikTok or Instagram. You'll never see their watch time or their retention graph. But here's what most people miss:

You don't need their analytics. Their best stuff is already public, and it's basically sorted by what worked.

Every view count, every like, every comment is right there on their profile. The signal is all in the open. You just have to know how to read it. Here's how to find any creator's best Shorts and Reels and copy what's actually working.

Why this beats staring at your own numbers

Your own analytics only show what worked for you, with your audience, doing what you already do. That's a small sample.

A competitor in your niche — especially one a bit bigger than you — has already tried hundreds of things you haven't. Their profile is a free record of all those tries, with the results stuck right on each one. Copying what works there is the fastest way to find good ideas without spending a month testing them yourself.

And to be clear: the goal isn't to rip someone off. It's to spot the patterns that keep winning in your niche, then do your own version, better.

Step 1: Find their best videos, not their newest

The mistake everyone makes is scrolling someone's recent posts and reacting to whatever's on top. Recent isn't the same as best.

Sort by what did well instead:

• TikTok shows view counts on every video. Scan the profile and look for the ones that did way more than the rest. Some profiles let you sort by most popular too.
• Instagram Reels shows view counts right on the Reels tab. Scroll the whole grid and look for the spikes, not the average.
• YouTube Shorts shows views on the Shorts tab, and you can sort a channel by "Popular" to find the all-time hits.

What you're hunting for is the one that blew up — a video that did 5 or 10 times their normal numbers. One Short with 2M views on an account that usually gets 50K is worth more to you than ten videos that all did 60K. The big one is where the lesson is.

Step 2: Figure out their "normal"

A view count means nothing on its own. 200K views is a flop for someone who usually gets 2M, and a smash for someone who usually gets 10K.

So before you judge any single video, look at their last 10 to 20 posts and get a feel for their normal range. Now you can actually spot the ones that beat their own average by a lot. Those are the only ones worth breaking down. The rest is noise.

This is also why a small creator with a really engaged audience can teach you more than a huge account coasting on reach. Bigger isn't always better to learn from.

Step 3: Break down the big one

Once you've found a real outlier, pull it apart:

1. Name the hook. What happens in the first 3 seconds? What does it promise?
2. Look at the structure. One idea or many? Fast cuts or slow? When does it pay off the hook?
3. Read the comments. This is the cheat code. The comments tell you exactly why people cared — what surprised them, what they argued about, what made them tag a friend. That's the emotion that made it spread, handed to you for free.
4. Note the format, not just the topic. Was it a talking head? A green-screen reaction? Text over b-roll? Formats copy across topics way better than the topics themselves.

Step 4: Look for what repeats across creators

One creator's hit could be a fluke. The real gold is when you break down the top videos of five different creators in your niche and the same thing keeps showing up:

• The same kind of hook keeps winning.
• A certain length keeps doing better.
• One format ("I tried X for 30 days") shows up in everyone's big videos.
• The same emotion runs through all the high-comment ones.

When something repeats across a bunch of accounts, that's not luck. That's your niche telling you what it responds to. Which is the exact thing you'd otherwise figure out one flop at a time over months.

The honest catch

Doing this by hand is slow, and you miss stuff. You're eyeballing view counts, guessing what's normal, rewatching videos to catch the hook, copy-pasting comments into a doc. For a couple creators, fine. For your whole niche, every week, it turns into a part-time job.

That's the boring part a tool can do for you. Creaswipe pulls any public creator's Shorts and Reels, sorts them by what beat their own average, and breaks down the hook and content of the winners — so the whole "find the big one, break it down, spot the pattern" loop takes a few minutes instead of an afternoon.

But the method matters more than any tool. Even by hand: find the breakouts, figure out their normal, read the comments, look for what repeats. Do that for the five accounts you most wish you were, and you'll have a map of your niche most of your competitors don't even know exists.