A Story's link sticker and a profile's bio link are two different features with two different, equally limited, click numbers. This page is about the Story sticker specifically, since it gets asked about separately and behaves a little differently from the bio link case covered in how to track link clicks on Instagram.
What Story Insights actually shows
Open a Story you posted that has a link sticker on it and check its Insights panel. For a Story that's still active, this sits behind a swipe-up gesture from the Story itself; for one that's expired, it's under your profile's archive. Either way, the number you get is a single tap count for that sticker: how many times, in total, someone tapped it. There is no breakdown by who, no list of taps in order, and no way to filter it down to a subset of viewers.
The viewer list is a separate, unlinked feature
Instagram does show you a full list of who viewed the Story, usernames and all, which is more visibility than most platforms give for ephemeral content. The confusion this causes is understandable: if you can see who viewed the Story and how many people tapped the link, it feels like the platform should just show the overlap. It doesn't. The two lists exist in Instagram's interface but are never joined into one, and there's no export or API that reconstructs the link between them from the outside either.
Why Instagram draws the line here on purpose
This isn't an oversight; it's the same privacy posture Instagram takes with the bio link tap count, the DM read receipt system, and most other engagement signals on the platform. Telling a Story's poster exactly which specific viewers tapped a link would expose granular behavioral data about individual accounts to whoever posted the content, which is a meaningfully bigger privacy surface than an anonymous aggregate number. Facebook and TikTok both hold roughly the same line for their own equivalent features, for the same reason.
The workaround people actually use, and its real limits
The closest thing to a workaround is sorting the Story's viewer list by engagement rather than recency. Instagram tends to surface the accounts that interact with you most often near the top, and for a small, engaged audience, cross-referencing "who watches most of my Stories" against "roughly how many taps did this one get" can produce a reasonable shortlist of likely tappers. It stops being useful past a few dozen viewers, and it never produces a confirmed answer, only a ranked guess. Treat it as intuition, not data.
What actually closes the gap
A UTM-tagged link answers a different, more useful question than "which Instagram account tapped this," which is "did anyone act on this specific post, and what did they do next." Tag the link sticker's destination with UTM parameters naming the Story specifically, in the campaign or content field, and your own analytics platform will show a click event tied to that Story the moment someone taps through, along with when it happened, what device they were on, and roughly where from. It will never hand back an Instagram username, since that identity never leaves Instagram's own systems, but it replaces a single opaque tap count with a real, attributable click log, which is the part Instagram was never going to provide.