How to find questions and buying intent in Instagram comments

What buying intent looks like in comments

Buying-intent comments tend to fall into a few patterns:

• Price: “how much?”, “price?”, “cost?”, “precio?”, “quanto custa?”, “preço?”
• Availability and variants: “do you have it in blue?”, “size M?”, “restock?”, “sold out?”
• Where to buy: “link?”, “where can I buy this?”, “website?”, “dónde lo compro?”, “onde compra?”
• Delivery: “do you ship to Canada?”, “envíos a México?”, “entrega em SP?”, “frete?”
• Direct intent: “I want one”, “need this”, “DM me”, “sent you a message”, “quiero”, “quero”.

Many of these aren’t phrased as questions, and many questions aren’t about buying (“is this AI?”, “what song is this?”). So the reliable approach is two passes: one that catches questions, and one that catches buying keywords — then combine them.

Pass 1: filter to questions

1. Copy the link to the post or Reel (Share → Copy link). It needs to be on a public account.
2. Paste it into IGComments and press Get comments — no Instagram login.
3. In the Search view, turn on Questions. This shows every comment containing ? or ¿, so Spanish questions written with an opening ¿ are caught as well.
4. Turn on Top-level so you see customers’ questions rather than your team’s replies. (Leave replies in if customers often ask follow-ups inside threads.)
5. Sort newest first to deal with the most recent people first, or most liked to find the questions many people share.
6. Use Export these to download exactly those rows.

The stats panel shows how many questions there are in total, which is a useful number to track from post to post. Posts with up to 200 comments are free; on larger posts the first 200 are a free preview, and a one-time Export Pass ($4.99 for up to 10,000 comments) includes the rest.

Pass 2: search buying keywords

The search box matches part of a word, ignores capitals, and covers usernames as well as comment text. Search one keyword at a time — there isn’t a keyword-list filter — and export each result. Short stems work best because they catch variations:

Search for	Catches
price, pric	price, prices, pricing
how much	how much, how much is it
ship	ship, shipping, ships to
size	size, sizes, sizing
link	link, link?, link please
buy, order	buy, where to buy, ordering
precio, cuánto, envío	Spanish price, how much and shipping
preço, quanto, frete	Portuguese price, how much and shipping

Watch for false positives from substring matching: link also matches “linked” and “blinking”, and a short stem like cost matches “costume”. If a keyword brings back mostly noise, use a longer form. Accents matter in search — envio and envío are different strings — so try both. The comment search page has more detail.

Doing all the keywords at once in a spreadsheet

For a regular workflow, it is faster to export every comment once and flag buying intent with a formula. Comment text is in column E.

Google Sheets — add a column headed intent with:

=ARRAYFORMULA(IF(E2:E="", "", REGEXMATCH(LOWER(E2:E), "pric|how much|cost\b|ship|deliver|size|link|buy|order|stock|available|precio|cu[aá]nto|env[ií]o|talla|pre[cç]o|quanto|frete|tamanho|[?¿]")))

Excel — in a new column:

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"pric","how much","ship","size","link","buy","order","stock","precio","cuanto","cuánto","envio","envío","preço","quanto","frete","~?","¿"}, E2)))>0

The ~? is deliberate: in SEARCH a bare ? is a wildcard that matches any character. Then filter the column to TRUE. Adjust the keyword lists to your product — a restaurant needs “book” and “reserva”; a course creator needs “enrol” and “cupón”. Add a second flag for urgent words (“today”, “still available”, “sold out”) if timing matters to you.

More formula patterns are in exporting to Google Sheets and exporting to Excel.

Turn the results into a sheet your sales team can use

A list of comments isn’t a workflow yet. A few extra columns make it one:

• category — price, availability, shipping, where to buy, other. Fill it by hand; it takes a minute per few dozen rows and makes reporting easy.
• owner — who is replying.
• status — new, replied, sent DM, sold, no response.
• link to comment — the post URL, so whoever replies can open it; on a computer, Ctrl+F (Cmd+F) on the post page finds a username once its comment has loaded.

Keep comment_id in the sheet. When you export the same post again next week, you can bring in only the new rows by checking which comment IDs are already there: =COUNTIF(Old!B:B, B2)=0 is TRUE for comments you haven’t seen before.

Before you build a habit of this, a word on etiquette and rules. Replying publicly to a public question, or answering in DMs when the person asked you to, is normal customer service. Mass-messaging everyone who commented — especially on someone else’s post — is not, and can break Instagram’s rules and anti-spam law. The export contains no emails or phone numbers, by design. See is it legal to export Instagram comments.

What to learn from the questions

Beyond answering people, the questions are product and content feedback:

• The same question 30 times means the caption, landing page or product page is missing that answer. Price and shipping are the usual culprits.
• Questions in Spanish or Portuguese on an English post tell you where interest is coming from, and whether a translated caption or a regional shipping note would help.
• Most-liked questions are the ones many viewers wanted answered — good material for a follow-up post or pinned comment.
• Comments per day in the stats shows when interest peaked, which helps you judge how quickly replies need to happen.

Comparing the question count and the share of buying-intent comments across posts gives you a simple, honest measure of which content actually moves people toward buying. For the broader approach, see how to analyze Instagram comments without AI.

FAQ

How do I find all the questions in Instagram comments?

Fetch the post in IGComments and turn on the Questions filter. It shows every comment containing a question mark or an inverted question mark, and you can export just those rows.

Can I filter by several buying keywords at once?

The search box takes one word or phrase at a time. For a keyword list, export all comments and use REGEXMATCH in Google Sheets or SEARCH in Excel to flag matches.

Does it work with Spanish and Portuguese comments?

Yes. The Questions filter catches both ? and ¿, and search works on any language — search for precio, preço, cuánto or quanto just as you would for price.

Can I export the commenters’ contact details for my sales team?

No. The export contains usernames and comment data only — no emails, phone numbers or profile data. Reply to people on Instagram.

Does this work on ads?

It works on public posts and Reels, including posts you boosted. Ads created as new creative in Ads Manager often don’t exist as a public post with a link you can copy, so their comments are best reviewed in Meta’s own tools.