How to search your X (Twitter) followers and following lists

No. X's following FAQ describes the lists only as lists: "The followers link on your profile page or home page will show you how many followers you have and who they are." None of its answers mentions a way to search, filter or sort them, and X's pages on search don't mention one either. X's web app, as of October 2026, has no search box on the Followers or Following tab either: its text has no words for one, and its code asks X for the list 20 accounts at a time as you scroll.

One of X's own designers has asked for one. On 15 February 2023, Andrea Conway, a designer at Twitter (now X), wrote that "you should be able to search and sort your follower/following lists", with mock-ups of a Following list topped by a Search box. In June 2023 she posted a mock-up of a Followers list with a search box, which Social Media Today reported as an early test, and in February 2024 one with a sort menu. We found no sign that any of them launched.

So on X, finding someone in a long list means scrolling. On a computer, your browser's find in page (Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac) helps only a little: X's web app draws just the accounts around what's on screen, so it can't search the rest. Most follower lists are short: in Pew Research Center's 2021 study of US adults on Twitter, the median account among the least active three-quarters had 29 followers, and among the most active quarter, 230 (public accounts, June to September 2021).

You don't need the list for that. Go to the account itself:

1. 1

   Open its profile

   Search for its name or @username in X's search, and open the profile.

2. 2

   Look next to its @handle

   While you're signed in, "Follows you" there means it follows you; no label means it doesn't.

3. 3

   Check the button

   If it follows you and you don't follow it, the button reads "Follow back".

Those are X's own labels, going by its web app's text in October 2026. If you can't find the account, it may have changed its @username, been suspended or left X: what "This account doesn't exist" means.

X's search has one filter based on follows. X's search help says, for a computer: "Click the Search filters options to filter your results From anyone or People you follow, and Anywhere or Near you." In X's iPhone and Android apps, its help says to tap the filter icon in the search bar. It narrows results to the accounts you follow. There is no filter for the accounts that follow you.

X doesn't say whether it also narrows the People tab, where search lists accounts. On the web, as of October 2026, picking it adds filter:follows to your search on every tab, People included. We found that operator on no X help or developer page, and back in May 2018 a user already called it "an undocumented Twitter search operator". So try it to look for a name among the accounts you follow, but X promises nothing about what it returns.

Advanced search doesn't help either: it finds posts from an account, in reply to it or mentioning it, and has no field for followers.

No. Their Followers and Following tabs are lists like yours, with no search. What X adds on other people's profiles is "Followers you know": the people you follow who follow that account, at an address ending in followers_you_follow. X's web app shows that tab only when at least one account you follow follows them. It isn't a list of your mutuals.

On x.com you need to be signed in to open anyone's lists. X doesn't say whether a protected account's lists show to people who don't follow it: can you hide your followers on X?

Not on X: none of its searches can be limited to your followers. X's help describes finding people "by name or username", and doesn't say whether bios are searched.

X's paid API does search bios, across all of X rather than your followers. Its user search can "Find users by name, username, or content in their bio". X announced it on 14 December 2023 for its Pro tier, and as of October 2026 it costs $0.010 per account it returns. Its docs allow only unaccented letters (A to Z), digits, underscores, apostrophes and spaces in a query, up to 50 characters.

X's followers endpoint has no search parameter at all. So to search all your followers' bios, a tool reads your whole list first, and X's API charges for that per follower: how to export your followers.

We keep the lists X doesn't let you search. Once we've checked your account, your Followers, Following and Unfollowers lists each have a search box. It finds the accounts whose @username, display name or X account number contains what you type: capitals don't matter, and part of a name is enough. It searches the whole saved list, not only the page you're on, and starts about half a second after you stop typing. It doesn't search bios, which we don't save.

• On Followers, set "You follow" to "Yes" or "No" to search the followers you follow back, or the ones you don't.
• On Following, set "Follows you" to "No" to search the accounts that don't follow you back. That's our "Not following back" list.
• Set "Audience" to "10K+ followers" to keep accounts with 10,000 followers or more.

Followers and Unfollowers change at every check, once a month on Free and every day on the paid Kong plan. We reread who you follow only every second check, and only if you follow no more than 4,000 accounts on Free (10,000 on Kong). To search the lists in a spreadsheet instead, Settings exports them under "Your data".

The sources are Twitter's posts Following and Followers Page Improvements and Simpler search, SEOmoz's post as archived in August 2012, Andrea Conway's posts of 15 February 2023, 21 June 2023 and 14 February 2024, Andréa López's post and X's announcement on its developer forum, linked above.