Where to Find Influencers for Your Brand in 2026 (Platforms, Marketplaces, DMs)

TL;DR. Where to find influencers for your brand in 2026 splits into five channels: marketplaces, agencies, native platform search, hashtag and explore browsing, and existing customer mentions. The right channel for you depends on three things — budget, niche specificity, and how many hours per week you can put on the discovery task. Most brands need two of the five, not all five. The rest of this guide walks the trade-offs, names the platforms (Modash, Upfluence, Collabstr, Aspire, plus our own marketplace), and gives both the brand-side workflow and the creator-side view of how to be found.

Before Collabios existed, I ran dropshipping stores on Shopify and spent more Saturdays than I want to count looking for influencers. The first store was a phone-accessory drop, and the way I discovered creators was the way most first-time brand operators still do it in 2026: I opened Instagram, typed a hashtag like #phonecase, scrolled until my thumb hurt, and DMed anyone with more than 10,000 followers who posted something I liked. Out of 50 cold DMs I sent in week one, three replied. Two of those three wanted a flat $300 plus the product, and the third wanted a free unit and never posted. The economics did not work and I had no idea why until I started actually counting hours per booked collaboration.

The reason I am telling you that story is that the question "where to find influencers" has a different answer depending on the hour you have available. If you have 20 hours a week and zero budget, hashtag scrolling plus cold DMs is a real channel — it is just the slowest one. If you have one hour a week and a small budget, a marketplace with audience filters is the only thing that scales. If you have a five-figure monthly spend and zero hours, an agency is fine. The mistake I made on the phone-accessory store was assuming the question had one answer. It does not. Below is the breakdown by channel, with the honest cost in time and money per channel and the kind of creator each one tends to surface.

For creators reading this: the same five channels are how brands discover you. Each channel rewards a different signal on your profile, and the creators who get inbound briefs on Collabios are the ones who have optimised for at least two of them. Skip to the creator-side section if that is what you came for, or read the brand-side first to understand how the buyer makes the decision.

Every guide that lists "10 ways to find influencers" is padded. There are five real channels. Each one has a cost in money, a cost in time per shortlist, and a different bias in the creators it surfaces. The table below is the one I wish I had on the wall in 2022.

Comparison: the five influencer discovery channels in 2026

I have used four of the five channels for real money over the past four years. The fifth (agencies) I have only watched friends use. The order in the table is the order I would walk a new brand through if they sat down with me on a Saturday and asked where to start: marketplaces first, then native search to backfill candidates the marketplace did not surface, then customer mentions if the brand has any sales history, then cold DMs only if budget is zero and time is unlimited, agencies only if the brand cannot fit any of the above into its operations.

The marketplace channel is the one that has changed the most since I was scrolling hashtags in 2022. Five platforms publicly position themselves around brand-to-creator discovery, and each one fits a slightly different brand profile. The summary below is based on each platform's public sitemap and marketing pages as of mid-2026 — read it as honest positioning, not a feature claim.

Modash (modash.io) positions itself around audience-quality scoring and fake-follower detection. Best fit for brands that already have a longlist and want to filter it down to a vetted shortlist before outreach. Public marketing emphasises the discovery and audience-analytics layer rather than booking or payment.

Upfluence (upfluence.com) positions itself around the full-funnel workflow — discovery plus outreach automation plus campaign reporting. Best fit for brands running 10+ creator campaigns simultaneously and wanting one system to track the whole funnel. Pricing is enterprise-tier.

Collabstr (collabstr.com) positions itself around flat-rate transactional booking. Brands browse creator profiles, see a published rate, and book directly. Best fit for one-off campaigns where the brand wants speed over negotiation. Public positioning is the most consumer-friendly of the five.

Aspire (aspire.io) positions itself around mid-market and enterprise creator programs. Best fit for brands running ongoing ambassador and affiliate programs across multiple creators. Check the latest pricing and feature pages directly on aspire.io before committing — Aspire iterates its product positioning more often than the other four.

Collabios (collabios.com) positions itself around manually vetted European and US creators with built-in EU regulatory awareness. Best fit for brands running cross-border EU campaigns where Loi 2023-451, ASA/CAP Code or FTC §255.5 disclosure obligations apply. No subscription; per-collaboration fee; browse the marketplace without an account.

The honest answer on which to pick: try the free browse on two of them before paying anything. The platforms differ less on raw creator count than on what filters and signals they surface first. A brand that values audience-authenticity scoring will feel at home on Modash; a brand that values speed-to-booking will feel at home on Collabstr; a brand running EU campaigns under Loi 2023-451 will feel at home on Collabios. None of the five is bad — they just optimise for different first questions.

Every social platform now ships a native discovery tool for brands, and most brands skip them because the interfaces are clunky. They are still worth an hour a week as a longlist source — particularly for emerging creators who have not yet joined a marketplace.

Instagram. The Explore tab plus targeted hashtag search is the cheapest way to surface creators in a specific aesthetic or niche. Use Instagram's Professional Dashboard if you have a Business account — there is a "Find creators" surface that filters by category and audience size. The weakness is that Instagram shows you no audience-quality signal whatsoever: a creator with 200K followers and 50K of them bots looks identical in the Explore feed to a creator with 200K and 200K real followers. Always cross-check candidates through a fake-follower scan before outreach.

TikTok Creator Marketplace. TikTok's native discovery tool sits inside the TikTok for Business platform. Brands can filter by country, follower size, and self-declared category, then send a brief through TikTok itself. The filters are coarser than Modash or Collabios, but the creators surfaced here are TikTok-native and often haven't cross-listed elsewhere. Worth checking if TikTok is your primary platform.

YouTube Studio. YouTube does not have a brand-facing discovery tool that matches Instagram or TikTok's native marketplaces, but YouTube's search plus the channel-categories filter is still the best way to surface long-form-video creators in a niche. Use YouTube's Trending tab filtered by region to spot emerging channels that have not yet been picked up by agencies.

LinkedIn. Overlooked for B2B influencer discovery. Hashtag search on LinkedIn plus the "People" filter narrowed by industry surfaces thought-leader creators who do not appear on consumer-facing platforms. Best for B2B SaaS, finance, recruitment and professional-services brands.

Hashtag browsing plus cold DMs is the slowest channel I have used as a brand operator. It is also where I learned the most about why some outreach works and some does not, so it is worth covering honestly even though I no longer recommend it as a primary channel.

The way it works: you open Instagram or TikTok, type a hashtag relevant to your niche (#cleanbeauty, #homeoffice, #ramen, whatever your product touches), scroll the top-posts and recent-posts tabs, and save anyone who posts well-engaged content in your aesthetic. After 30-60 minutes of scrolling per hashtag, you have 20-30 candidates. You then DM each one with a pitch.

The reply rate on cold DMs is the part most brand operators get wrong. When I was running the phone-accessory store, my first DM template said "Hi! Love your content. Would love to send you a free product in exchange for a post!" My reply rate was 6 percent.

After I rewrote the template to reference a specific recent post the creator had made plus a concrete cash budget number (not a free unit), the reply rate jumped to about 22 percent. The two changes that matter on cold DMs are exactly what works on cold email: prove you actually watched their content with a specific reference, and put a real budget number on the table. Free product only works for creators under 5,000 followers, and even then it is risky.

The reason this channel is still worth knowing about is that it surfaces creators no marketplace will: hyper-local micro-creators, creators in emerging niches, and creators who simply have not signed up for a marketplace yet. If you sell to a niche under 50,000 monthly searches in your category, hashtag DM-ing is sometimes the only way to find your top 10 candidates. Just budget 6-10 hours per shortlist of 10 and expect a 15-20 percent reply rate after you get the message template right.

If your brand has any meaningful sales volume, the cheapest and highest-converting creator discovery channel is your own tagged-posts feed. Customers who already use and like your product are the most authentic possible influencer partners, and they are often willing to do a paid collaboration at half the rate of a cold creator because they already understand the product.

The workflow: once a quarter, pull your branded-hashtag mentions, your tagged-posts notifications, and any UGC submitted through your site. Filter for creators who post regularly, have an aesthetic that fits your brand, and have at least 5,000 followers. Reach out with a thank-you message first, then a paid-collaboration brief 7-10 days later. Conversion rates on this channel are typically 40-50 percent — far higher than any other discovery channel, because the relationship already exists.

The limitation is that this only works for brands with active customers. A pre-launch DTC brand with zero sales has no customer mentions to mine, so the channel is unusable until traction starts. Once it does start, this is the channel I would prioritise above all others.

This section is for creators reading the guide. The same five channels brands use are how brands discover you, and the creators who get inbound briefs are the ones who have optimised for at least two of them. Skipping this is the single most common reason creators with great content sit at 20,000 followers without a single paid partnership.

To be found on marketplaces. Sign up to two or three creator marketplaces with non-overlapping focus. Optimise your bio with the niche keyword brands search for (not the creative description you would put on Instagram), upload a rate card with concrete numbers (vague "DM for rates" reduces inbound briefs by roughly half — brands filter you out if they cannot see a number), and pick niche tags that match what brands type into the search bar, not what feels poetic.

To be found by native platform search. Use the exact category language Instagram, TikTok Creator Marketplace and YouTube Studio use in their filters. If you describe yourself as "lifestyle creator + clean girl aesthetic" but brands search "skincare creator," the platform algorithm cannot bridge the gap. Pick the boring-but-searchable label and put the aesthetic in your bio second line.

To be found via hashtag and explore browsing. Brands scrolling hashtags are looking for engagement quality first, follower count second. Comments that read like real conversations beat 100K followers with emoji-only comments every time. Optimise your hooks for the first 3 seconds and the first 2 comments — those are what brand operators see when they are scrolling 60 candidates an hour.

To be found via customer mentions. If there is a brand you would happily work with at full rate, buy the product, use it well, post about it organically with the brand tag and a thoughtful caption. Brand marketing teams scan their tagged posts weekly. Three or four high-quality organic mentions over a quarter put you on the brand-side radar in a way that cold DMs almost never do. This is how I have seen creators on Collabios land their first deal with brands they did not have any prior contact with.

To be found by agencies. Agencies build their roster from the same channels — marketplaces, native search and customer mentions. Being visible on the first three is what makes agencies pick you up. There is no shortcut.

The discovery channel you use does not change the regulatory obligations that apply once you book the creator. Three rule sets matter for brands operating in the EU, UK and US.

EU + France. The Loi 2023-451 of 9 June 2023 plus the Décret 2025-1137 of 28 November 2025 require a written contract for any influencer partnership above €1,000 ex-VAT, and require explicit "Publicité" or "Collaboration commerciale" labelling on every paid post.

The rules apply regardless of whether you found the creator on a marketplace, through an agency, or through a cold DM. Sanctions go up to €300,000 plus criminal liability. The Loi 2023-451 + Décret 2025-1137 rules are the strictest in the EU and apply to any creator with a French audience — including those discovered cross-border.

UK. The ASA/CAP Code §2.1 plus the CMA Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 require clear "AD" labels on every paid post and give the CMA the power to investigate non-compliant brands directly (not just the creator). Hashtag-buried "#ad" inside a stack of hashtags is not enough per ASA rulings.

US. The FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255 §255.5) require any "material connection" between a creator and a seller — paid, gifted, commission-based, or any other consideration — to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. The rules apply whether you found the creator on Collabstr or scrolled into them on Instagram. Disclosure compliance is the brand's responsibility, not just the creator's.

What this means in practice: choose a discovery channel that surfaces creators with a clean disclosure history. Hashtag scrolling gives you zero visibility into past compliance; marketplaces with a vetting layer give you full visibility. The cost of an ASA or DGCCRF investigation is higher than the cost of using a vetted marketplace, every time.

If you have read this far and still want a single recommendation, here is the decision tree I would walk a new brand operator through.

• Pre-launch brand, zero budget, unlimited time. Start with hashtag and explore browsing plus cold DMs. Budget 6-10 hours per shortlist of 10. Reply rates will be 15-22 percent if your DM template is good.
• Pre-launch brand, small budget (€2K-€10K total campaign budget), 1-2 hours a week. Start with a marketplace browse on two of the five platforms above. Filter by niche, country and tier. Send 10-15 personalised outreach messages. Expect 3-5 bookings.
• Sales-stage brand with active customers, small budget, 1-2 hours a week. Start with your own tagged-posts and customer-mention mining. This will produce your three or four best partnerships. Then backfill with a marketplace.
• Sales-stage brand, mid-size budget (€10K-€50K), running multiple campaigns. Use a marketplace with full-funnel features (Upfluence-style positioning) or a per-collab marketplace like Collabios depending on whether you want subscription or per-collab pricing.
• Established brand, six-figure budget, no in-house capacity. Use an agency. Pay the commission. Move on.

If you are unsure where you fit, start with a marketplace browse — it is the channel with the highest information-to-time ratio. Browse pre-vetted European and US creators on Collabios for free without an account, or read the adjacent guides linked below for the vetting and outreach steps that come after discovery.

Whether you are a brand looking for creators or a creator looking to be discovered by brands, the next step is the same: pick one of the five channels above and put a week of effort into it before judging the result.

• 👉 Browse pre-vetted European and US creators on Collabios (free to browse, no account required).
• 👉 Post a campaign brief (free) and receive applications from pre-qualified creators.
• 👉 Read the vetting guide for what to check after you have built a shortlist — discovery is step one, verification is step two.