Search Threads users

Try in Playground

Discover public Threads accounts by keyword, including identity, display name, profile pictures, verification, biography, follower count and privacy flag.

GET/v1/threads/search/usersx-api-key

Headers

Get your API key

x-api-keystringrequiredheader

Your ScrapeAtlas customer key. Create one on /account/ and set SCRAPEATLAS_API_KEY.

Query parameters

querystringrequiredquery

Keywords or a handle fragment, 1–200 characters.

min 1 chars · max 200 chars

Exampleexample

limitintegerquery

Most accounts to return, 1–10 (default 5; each account is one profile page read). The index is asked for 20 profile pages; permalinks beyond the limit set users_truncated.

1 – 10

Response fields

requestIdstring

Request correlation identifier.

HTTP attempts for the operation (profile, posts, post, comments: one page load, plus one canonical redirect hop for short, threads.net or wrongly attributed permalinks; search: a bodiless session probe (HEAD on the login route) plus one document, with the login page read only when the probe sets no cookie; user search: the index and one profile page per account, five by default and ten at most; each with the shared transient retry), decoded bytes and duration.

accounting.upstreamRequestsinteger

Always included.

≥ 0

accounting.responseBytesinteger

Always included.

≥ 0

accounting.durationMsnumber

Always included.

≥ 0

successboolean

True when usable data is returned; inspect status and coverage for omissions.

statusenum

success, partial, failed, or challenged. HTTP 200 can be partial.

one of: success, partial

sourceUrlstring

Canonical threads.com URL of the profile, post or search (user search: the web index endpoint, query excluded).

absolute HTTPS URL

fetchedAtstring

UTC retrieval time.

Complete means every source field of the operation was returned; warnings name every omission or cap (private_account, posts_first_page_only, posts_truncated, comments_first_page_only, comments_truncated, related_posts_truncated, parent_posts_truncated, search_results_truncated, date_filter_applied, users_truncated, users_omitted). Source is public_web, or web_index for user search.

coverage.sourceenum

Always included.

one of: public_web, web_index

coverage.completeboolean

Always included.

coverage.warningsenum[]

users_truncated when the index listed more profiles than limit; users_omitted when a listed profile no longer resolves.

querystring

Keywords or a handle fragment, 1–200 characters.

min 1 chars

Always included.

up to 10 items

users.usernamestring

Always included.

min 1 chars

users.pkstring

Always included.

users.full_namestringnullable

Always included.

users.profile_pic_urlstring

Always included.

users.is_verifiedboolean

Always included.

users.has_onboarded_to_text_post_appbooleannullable

Always included.

users.idstring

Always included.

users.biographystringnullable

Always included.

users.follower_countintegernullable

Always included.

users.hd_profile_pic_versionsobject[]nullable

Always included.

users.text_post_app_is_privatebooleannullable

Always included.

HTTP 200 returns the success variant. Check status: partial means usable data with warnings, and failed or challenged requests carry a failure object described in Errors & responses.

Error codes

HTTP	failure.code	Meaning
400	`invalid_request`	Missing, duplicate, malformed or unsupported parameters, handles, dates or URLs.
401	`unauthorized`	Invalid API key.
404	`not_found`	Unknown handle (Threads redirects it to the login form) or unknown post code.
403	`restricted_page`	The page or document is restricted to signed-in viewers.
503	`search_unavailable`	User search was called without a configured search key.
502	`search_failed`	The web search index answered with an error, a non-JSON body or an unexpected shape.
429	`upstream_rate_limited`	Threads or the web index rate limited the request.
502	`upstream_challenged`	Threads answered the request with a challenge page instead of a document (status challenged).
502	`operation_unavailable`	Threads no longer serves the pinned document for this operation.
502	`unsafe_redirect`	Threads redirected the request somewhere other than the login form or the canonical permalink.
502	`unsupported_page`	The page or GraphQL result is missing, mismatched or structurally unsupported.
502	`response_too_large`	The decoded responses exceeded 8 MiB.
502	`payload_too_complex`	The response exceeded the JSON depth or node limits.
502	`request_limit`	The upstream request budget was exhausted.
502	`upstream_error`	Network failure or HTTP 5xx after the single retry.
503	`busy`	All retrieval slots are busy.
504	`timeout`	The 45-second deadline elapsed.

Code example

curl "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/threads/search/users?query=example" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

const response = await fetch(
  "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/threads/search/users?query=example",
  {
    headers: {
      "x-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY"
    }
  }
);

const data = await response.json();
console.log(data.status, data);

type Result = {
  status: "success" | "partial" | "failed" | "challenged";
  requestId: string;
  [field: string]: unknown;
};

const response = await fetch(
  "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/threads/search/users?query=example",
  {
    headers: {
      "x-api-key": process.env.SCRAPEATLAS_API_KEY!
    }
  }
);

const data = (await response.json()) as Result;
if (data.status === "failed" || data.status === "challenged") {
  throw new Error(`Threads request failed: ${data.requestId}`);
}
console.log(data);

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/threads/search/users",
    headers={"x-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "query": "example"
    },
    timeout=60,
)
data = response.json()
print(data["status"], data)

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/threads/search/users?query=example", nil)
	req.Header.Set("x-api-key", "YOUR_API_KEY")
	resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	var data map[string]interface{}
	json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&data)
	fmt.Println(data["status"], data)
}

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpClient;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        var client = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
        var request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
            .uri(URI.create("https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/threads/search/users?query=example"))
            .GET()
            .header("x-api-key", "YOUR_API_KEY")
            .build();
        var response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString());
        System.out.println(response.body());
    }
}

Use your sa_live_… customer key at https://api.scrapeatlas.com.

Responses

Successful result. Synthetic example validated against the runtime contract.

{
  "success": true,
  "query": "example",
  "users": [
    {
      "username": "example",
      "pk": "1234567890",
      "full_name": "Example Person",
      "profile_pic_url": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/example_s150x150.jpg",
      "is_verified": true,
      "has_onboarded_to_text_post_app": true,
      "id": "1234567890",
      "biography": "Example bio",
      "follower_count": 120000,
      "hd_profile_pic_versions": [
        {
          "height": 320,
          "url": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/example_s320x320.jpg",
          "width": 320
        },
        {
          "height": 640,
          "url": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/example_s640x640.jpg",
          "width": 640
        }
      ],
      "text_post_app_is_private": false
    }
  ],
  "status": "success",
  "requestId": "0b7f1e5c-3c2a-4a4e-9c9b-1f3d2c0a8e21",
  "sourceUrl": "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-13T10:00:00.000Z",
  "coverage": {
    "source": "web_index",
    "complete": true,
    "warnings": []
  },
  "accounting": {
    "upstreamRequests": 2,
    "responseBytes": 973000,
    "durationMs": 1600
  }
}

Missing, duplicate, malformed or unsupported parameters, handles, dates or URLs.

{
  "requestId": "9d2f1c0a-6b1e-4c7d-9a8e-2f3b4c5d6e7f",
  "accounting": {
    "upstreamRequests": 0,
    "responseBytes": 0,
    "durationMs": 0
  },
  "success": false,
  "status": "failed",
  "failure": {
    "code": "invalid_request",
    "message": "Invalid request: missing, duplicate, unsupported or malformed parameters."
  }
}