Stats, caption, hook transcript, storyboard, and views/day velocity for any public Instagram Reel: clean JSON over a REST API. No Graph API, no app review, just public data enriched.
@livia.rae
is this my most-viewed video yet? 👀
Not a mockup. These rows come from the same discovery engine the API serves, ranked by age-normalized views/day. The feed currently represents 14.5B views across 1114 breakouts with 99 heating signals and 548 sounds captured across 3 platforms.
Snapshot captured 7m ago.
A view count tells you what already won. It can’t tell you the hook that made people stay, how fast a video is accelerating right now, or whether its format still has runway. viralcli returns all of it: per video, tracked over time, as a dataset you can build on.
Paste a Instagram Reels URL and get back the stats, caption, hook transcript, storyboard, and views/day velocity as a single structured object. Not five scrapes to stitch.
Views divided by age, so a 2-day breakout and a 2-month evergreen are finally comparable. The number that means “going viral now.”
The opening line as text and the visual beats as one image, so you read why a video worked instead of guessing from a thumbnail.
Give a keyword, get the breakout Instagram Reelsvideos ranked by velocity, plus the format’s adoption curve and a one-word read: heating, steady, or saturating. Each breakout carries the sound riding it. From a single scrape, no polling.
Freshest posts are outrunning older ones. The format still has runway.
One scrape tells you where a video stands. Keep watching and you get the truth: how fast it’s accelerating, whether it’s peaking, and a history no one else has. viralcli tracks any video or keyword and pushes events over the same API your agents already call.
Track a video or keyword and the watcher polls it on an adaptive cadence, fast while it accelerates, slow once cold, then pushes a signed webhook the moment velocity crosses your threshold or the video peaks. No dashboard to babysit.
Every snapshot lands in a longitudinal store: hot for live reads, Parquet for history, and exportable. The view counts you capture today become time-series trend history no official API can backfill tomorrow.
The same call shape works on every platform we cover, so an agent written for one is already written for all of them.
One command, or one HTTP request, returns the whole record as JSON, then keeps watching it over time. Same shape on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, so the code you write once runs everywhere.
# 1 · Analyze any short-form video — CLI or REST, same JSON
$ viralcli analyze "https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cxy123abcd/"
{
"platform": "instagram",
"views": 2840000,
"age_days": 3.1,
"views_per_day": 916129, # age-normalized velocity
"transcript": "you've been doing this wrong your whole life",
"transcript_kind": "hook", # the opening seconds, as text
"storyboard": "https://cdn.viralcli.com/sb/reels_7361234.jpg",
"creator": "@user"
}
# 2 · Discover breakouts for a keyword — heating or saturating?
$ curl -s -X POST https://api.viralcli.com/v1/discovery \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VIRALCLI_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"seed":"folding hack"}'
# {"verdict":"HEATING","breakouts":[{…,"sound":"…"}],"adoption_histogram":[…]}
# 3 · Track it over time — true velocity, acceleration, peaking
$ viralcli track <url> --webhook https://you.dev/hooks
# POST on breakout:
# {"event":"breakout","true_vpd":124000,"accel":18000}Instagram's official Graph API needs a business account, app review, and still won't hand you a competitor's Reels or a transcript. viralcli reads public Reels the way a browser does and returns clean JSON — caption, engagement, the spoken hook, and a velocity number Instagram never exposes.
One request to the Reels data API returns the caption, likes, comments, and creator for any public Reel — plus the hook transcript and a storyboard of the visual beats. No app review, no business-account linkage, no waiting on Meta to approve a use case.
Instagram is stingy with view counts, so reach is hard to judge. Where a Reel exposes plays, viralcli stamps its age and computes views per day; where it doesn't, engagement velocity stands in. Either way you can rank Reels by momentum instead of a raw, ageless number.
Every Reel comes back with its opening hook as text and its visual beats as a storyboard, so you can see exactly how a viral Reel opens and structures itself. Study a batch of breakouts and the repeatable format is obvious — then build your own on the same skeleton.
Paste a link, get the signal.
For solo builders and side projects.
For tools and agents in production.
Pipeline-grade volume + the dataset.
For any public Reel URL: caption, likes, comments, creator handle, a transcript of the spoken hook, a storyboard image of the visual beats, the Reel's age, and a velocity estimate (views/day where plays are exposed, engagement velocity otherwise). Private accounts are never accessed — public data only.
Free to start, no card. Analyze, track, and export short-form video data: one key, clean JSON.