The Qolab Score is the 0-100 number at the top of your profile, and it answers the one question a brand has before any other: is this audience real. It is computed from five weighted signals in your own connected Instagram data, recalculated on every sync, and no part of it can be typed in by hand. This post opens up all five.
We built it because vetting is where brand-side money leaks. Fake or bot followers account for 56.5 percent of all reported fraud and quality issues in influencer marketing, according to the Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report 2026. That is not a small tax on the category. It is the largest quality problem in it, and it is why a brand manager will not take a screenshot of your insights at face value.
What the five signals actually are
Each signal is scored 0 to 1, multiplied by its weight, then summed into the score out of 100.
- Engagement consistency, 25 percent. How steady your engagement rate is across recent posts. A real audience engages predictably. Wild swings usually mean manual pushes or bursts from a bot network.
- Engagement rate versus follower size, 25 percent. Creators in each size band sit inside a known engagement range. Suspiciously high flags as loudly as suspiciously low.
- No sudden follower spike, 20 percent. Bought followers leave a fingerprint. Net follower growth over the last 28 days that is unrealistic against your own baseline pulls this signal down.
- Follower-to-following ratio, 15 percent. Real creators usually carry at least three followers for every account they follow. Bot-style accounts follow thousands and get auto-followed back.
- Comments-to-likes ratio, 15 percent. Bots like easily and rarely comment. A healthy ratio sits between 1 and 10 percent.
The bands are simple. 75 and above is strong signals. 50 to 74 is mixed signals. Below 50 is weak signals. Across the 280 creators carrying a score on Qolab in September 2026, the median is 72, just under the strong band. 111 sit at 75 or above and 7 sit below 50.
What a brand sees when they click your score
Since August 2026 the score on the brand side is not just a number. A brand manager clicks the badge and gets the full working: each of the five signals, how strongly it scored, and a plain sentence explaining why.
That matters more than it sounds. Most creator-vetting scores in this market are computed from scraped public data, so the vendor cannot show the working without exposing how thin the inputs are. Ours comes from data the creator authorised, straight from Instagram, so we can open the whole thing up. A brand who can see why a score is 68 rather than 88 asks you a specific question instead of quietly skipping you.
For creators, the practical effect is that a middling score stops being a black mark and becomes a conversation. If your comments-to-likes ratio is what is dragging you down, the brand sees that is the reason, and sees your other four signals are clean.
Where brands search, and what they filter on
Brands run this in-house now. 66.33 percent of respondents say their influencer marketing is managed entirely in-house, and creator discovery and vetting is the most commonly outsourced function at 19.44 percent, according to the Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report 2026. Most brands do their own searching, and the ones who hand anything to an agency hand over exactly this part.
On Qolab's discover screen they filter by category, audience size, budget per reel, engagement rate, Qolab Score floor (50, 70 or 85), average likes, gender, language, state and city. There are also one-click segments that apply several of those at once: Commerce-ready, Top Qolab Score, Open to bookings, Festival-ready, South India, and Tier-2 or Tier-3.
Notice what is missing from that list: a "most followers" sort. Reach is one input among many, and for the D2C brands who make up most of the demand here it is rarely the deciding one. Our breakdown of what a follower count is actually worth in brand deals goes further into why.
What brands see when they open your profile
Your public profile at qolab.in/c/your-handle is where a brand lands. Top to bottom:
- Your picture, name, handle, location and categories
- Followers, engagement rate and estimated 30-day reach
- Your Qolab Score, with the signal breakdown one click away
- Your starting rates
- Your bio and about section, with languages and categories
- Engagement, content, audience and growth sections, each built from your synced numbers
- Your best posts and reels, auto-curated or hand-picked
- Your audience snapshot, top cities and gender split
Every number there is computed from data you authorised, straight from Instagram. Nothing on it can be padded, which is the entire point. Rates are part of that. Hiding them stopped being an option in May 2026: a hidden rate pushes the brand into your DMs, and a deal done in DMs has no payment protection behind it. Our full explanation of how Qolab Price is calculated covers where the suggested number comes from and how to set your own.
Does a bigger account get a better score?
This is the question we get most, so here is the actual distribution across every scored creator on Qolab in September 2026.
Nine points separate the lowest band from the highest, and the biggest accounts are not the winners. Half the accounts above 250K followers on Qolab score below 75. Nano creators sit lower on median largely because a small sample of posts makes the consistency signal noisier, not because their audiences are worse.
Engagement moves far more sharply than the score does. Median engagement rate on Qolab runs 9.19 percent under 10K followers and 1.26 percent in the 50K-250K band. That gap, not the score gap, is what a brand is buying when they book a smaller creator, and it is why the micro versus macro maths usually lands where it does.
What changed since this post went up
This post first went up in January 2026. The brand side of Qolab has changed enough since then that most of the original walkthrough no longer described the product. Dated, so you can see what is new:
- May 2026: shortlists and side-by-side creator comparison. Brands stopped keeping candidates in spreadsheets.
- May 2026: starting rates became a mandatory public section rather than something a creator could hide.
- July 2026: one-click segments on the discover screen.
- August 2026: a public one-page media kit at qolab.in/c/your-handle/kit, with your headline numbers, audience and rates for reel, story and static post. It prints cleanly, so it does the job of the PDF brands keep asking creators for.
- August 2026: Open Campaigns. Brands post a brief, creators browse and apply. Discovery runs in both directions now, so being findable is no longer the only way in.
- August 2026: brand lists with private notes, and the click-through Qolab Score breakdown described above.
Two things the January version of this post got wrong, corrected here: the score is five weighted signals, not seven, and rates are public rather than gated behind brand verification.
Three things that make you findable this week
- Fill in category, language, city and state. On Qolab in September 2026, 179 of the 273 creators with Instagram connected have all of those filled. The other 94 do not appear when a brand filters on any of them, whatever their numbers look like. Cheapest fix on this list, and the one most people skip.
- Connect Instagram and let the first sync finish. Your Qolab Score, engagement and audience data only exist after that sync. Before it, a brand filtering on a score floor cannot see you at all.
- Put qolab.in/c/your-handle in your Instagram bio. Brands who find you on Instagram then land on verified numbers instead of asking you for screenshots. If they want something to forward internally, send them the /kit version.
The creators getting booked here are not the biggest ones. They are the ones a brand can find, filter to, and verify in under a minute. All three of those are things you control. Our guide to setting up a Qolab profile properly walks through it if you are starting from scratch.
