Snapchat Public Profiles: What Anyone Can See
By the View Snapchat Stories team · · 2 min read
A new Snapchat account is private: only friends can see your story, and strangers can’t see much more than your name. A Public Profile is an optional page that anyone can see, in the app and on the web. Knowing what goes on it helps whether you’re posting or just watching.
What a Public Profile shows
| Item | Visible to everyone? |
|---|---|
| Display name, username, photo | Yes |
| Bio, website, business address | Yes, if you fill them in |
| Subscriber count | Optional, you can hide it |
| Public stories | Yes |
| Saved highlights | Yes |
| Spotlight videos | Yes |
| Lenses you made | Yes |
| Friends story, snaps, chats | No |
| Friends list, Snap Score | No |
Public story vs friends story
With a Public Profile you choose who sees each story post. Public goes to your profile page and anyone can watch it, including people using a viewer like View Snapchat Stories. My Friends or a custom list goes only to those people in the app. You can mix both on the same day.
How to turn a Public Profile on or off
- Open your profile in Snapchat (tap your Bitmoji, top left).
- Open Settings (gear icon) and find Public Profile.
- Follow the steps to create it, or delete it there.
Snapchat sets a minimum age for Public Profiles; the app tells you if your account doesn’t qualify. Deleting it removes your public page from the app and the web; it takes up to an hour to stop showing on sites that cache profiles, including ours.
Why some famous accounts show nothing
Having a public page doesn’t mean posting publicly. Plenty of well-known accounts keep a Public Profile with no story and no highlights, and post only to friends, or not at all. When we checked about 40 well-known names in October 2026, more than half had an empty public profile or none at all.
For viewers
- If someone you know has stories but our profile viewer shows none, they post to friends only. There’s no way around that.
- Creators and brands that do post publicly often keep a story up for several days, not just 24 hours.
