UGC for creators: how brands actually find you

What UGC work is in 2026, minus the pitch

UGC work is contract filming. A brand pays you to shoot footage it owns the right to run: a jar held at phone distance, a morning routine shot in your own bathroom, a voiceover laid over three cuts of the same bottle. The audience you built is beside the point. Most files never appear on your own feed; they go into a paid social ad account or onto a product page, with the brand's name on the post. The notes are picky, reshoot requests are normal, and the habit that gets you rebooked is delivering a clean file on the date you promised. Anyone selling this as passive income has never cut twelve hooks for the same protein powder in one afternoon.

Fields are read from what is already public. None of them can be submitted or edited through this site.

How a brand's search runs against public profiles

A brand writes its brief the way it would say it out loud: skincare creators in Canada under ten thousand followers who film their own face. Each profile is then scored against that sentence, the contact addresses are verified, duplicate accounts across Instagram and TikTok collapse into one row, and what comes out the other end is a list the brand exports. Nobody applies, and nobody is promoted for paying, because no listing fee and no form exist.

The score reads the words you wrote about yourself plus a handful of stored fields: platform, follower band, stated country, niche family, and whether any link in your bio leads to samples. It does not read engagement, because no engagement figure is kept anywhere in the data. It does not read your prices, because no pricing column exists to read. Follower numbers are held as ranges rather than exact counts, on the grounds that a count from March is fiction by September. So the sentences in your bio decide more than the numbers in it.

A country shows up in machine-readable form on only 12,877 of these profiles, a shade over half. A brand that has to post a sample to Manchester on Thursday is searching inside that half, and a blank location field keeps you out of the result no matter how good the footage behind it is.

The four signals that decide whether you survive a shortlist cut

Four things separate profiles that hold up under a buyer's eye from the ones scrolled past in two seconds. Follower count is not among them.

None of this needs better gear. It needs the profile to say, in text a stranger reads in four seconds, what you film and how to commission it.

1. A category stated in plain words11,519 profiles here sit with no category label, because nothing in their wording says what gets filmed. Putting skincare and haircare in your bio enters you in two category searches that half this index cannot appear in.
2. A link that opens to finished work67.9% of this index has no work link attached to it at all. The minority who do carry one get opened first, because a buyer choosing between two similar accounts watches a finished thirty second cut rather than asking anybody for one.
3. A band you present as a strengthThe middle of this index is a 1,706 follower account, and 11,292 creators cluster in the band just above it, between one thousand and five. Small is the norm in footage work, so a bio that hedges about audience size argues against a position you already hold.
4. A route a stranger can reach you onVerification runs on whatever contact route is public. A DM-only creator still gets found, but an export with a blank email column tends to be worked from the top down, and the top is whoever can be emailed this morning.

What this index does with your profile, and what it will never do

Every row here began as something a stranger could already see: a bio, a pinned reel, a portfolio page Google had indexed. Nothing arrives by submission. No signup exists for creators, no dashboard, no job board, and no place to log in and adjust what is stored about you. That trade cuts both ways. No account was ever moved up a buyer's result by paying for the position, and equally, this site cannot promise you work or pass a brief along to you.

Visible is not the same as qualified. Before a profile is kept, it has to look like an account somebody has paid to film something: tagged partnerships, product demos, a service stated in the bio. Size on its own fails. The most recent export threw out 1,598 accounts on exactly that test, a good number of them larger than anything in the bands above. A neat grid of holiday photographs does not get in. A grid with three tagged paid posts and a pinned demo does.

Spot an error in your entry, or want it gone altogether? Email hello@ugcagent.app. Corrections land at the next rebuild, and a removal is recorded so the following rebuild leaves you out instead of quietly restoring the profile a month later. The snapshot behind these pages is dated 14 September 2026, which is also the fairest way to judge whether what you are reading has gone stale.

Which page in this section to open first

The pages below are split by the decision in front of you rather than by stage of a funnel, so start with the one that matches this week.

The creator directory and the glossary entry for UGC creator are the buyer-facing view of the same data. Reading them tells you what somebody sees when your name surfaces in a search.

• Starting from zeroThe pages on becoming a UGC creator cover the first three samples, split by platform, because Instagram pacing and TikTok pacing are not the same edit.
• Deciding whether to botherThe worth-it page and the side hustle page put hours against fees, which is the calculation to run before you give this a month.
• Hunting for the work itselfThe UGC jobs pages break down the channels briefs actually arrive through, including which marketplaces waste a beginner's first fortnight.
• Pricing a brief that just landedThe UGC rate calculator converts a written scope into a budgeting figure, and the rate card page turns that figure into a document you can send back the same afternoon.
• Signing somethingThe UGC contract template and the usage rights page cover the two lines creators lose money on: how long the licence runs and where it runs.