Douyin Hot Search Scraper

Douyin Hot Search Scraper: trending topics from all four boards, no login

Douyin's hot boards are the ranked list of what China is searching and posting about right now. This reads them and gives you one row per topic: rank, the topic text, Douyin's heat score, views, how many videos and live rooms sit under it, the badge, when it started and the cover image.

There are about 156 topics in total across the four boards at any moment. That is the whole snapshot, so this is a thing you schedule and stack over time, not a thing you crawl deeply once.

🔍 What Douyin Hot Search Scraper does

Four boards, each its own ranking:

rising arrives inside the hot list's own response, so asking for both is no more work than asking for one.

The boards refresh every few minutes, so two runs ten minutes apart will disagree on ranks and heat values. boardActiveTime is Douyin's own timestamp for the snapshot, in Beijing time, and sentenceId stays the same for a topic across runs, which is what you join on when you build a time series.

📥 What you give it

{
  "boards": ["hot", "entertainment", "society", "rising"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

Clear the board list entirely and you get one labelled sample row instead of topics.

When maxItems runs out partway through your board list, the boards after it are skipped and noted in the log.

📤 What you get back

A real row, rank 1 on the hot list, with the signed image links cut short:

{
  "board": "hot",
  "boardName": "Douyin Hot List (抖音热榜)",
  "rank": 1,
  "isPinned": false,
  "word": "中国U23男足0:0伊朗U23",
  "hotValue": 11466642,
  "viewCount": 66387319,
  "videoCount": 3,
  "discussionVideoCount": 1,
  "articleCount": 0,
  "liveRoomCount": 0,
  "peakRank": 1,
  "label": 1,
  "labelName": "New (新)",
  "labelImageUrl": "https://lf3-static.bytednsdoc.com/obj/eden-cn/.../hotspot_detail_page/1.png",
  "eventTime": "2026-09-20T06:14:23.000Z",
  "eventTimestamp": 1789884863,
  "sentenceId": "2657642",
  "groupId": "7686803507378263306",
  "coverUrl": "https://p3-sign.douyinpic.com/tos-cn-p-0015/oca1BIeGagzO7nVBB7fsaXxueCkALI4tLSVpgA~noop.jpeg?...",
  "coverUrls": ["...", "...", "..."],
  "searchUrl": "https://www.douyin.com/search/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BDU23%E7%94%B7%E8%B6%B30%3A0%E4%BC%8A%E6%9C%97U23",
  "hotSpotUrl": "https://www.douyin.com/hot/2657642/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BDU23%E7%94%B7%E8%B6%B30%3A0%E4%BC%8A%E6%9C%97U23",
  "boardActiveTime": "2026-09-20 15:41:15",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-20T07:43:19.499Z"
}

A count of 0 can mean Douyin published no number for that row, not that the real figure is zero. It shows up on the pinned row and on rows that came back from the lighter source described below.

🧾 Reading the output

Douyin pins a promo or public-service row above rank 1 on the ranked boards. It is a real row in the dataset and it is counted like any other topic, so filter on isPinned if you do not want it.

When the main board cannot be read, some topics can still arrive from a lighter source. Those rows carry a source field, keep the topic text and heat value, and show 0 for the detailed counts.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Douyin Hot Search Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Pick your Boards. All four is about 156 rows and takes seconds. 3. Leave Maximum topics alone unless you only want the top of a board. 4. Click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.40 per 1,000 topics. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per topic row, and the pinned promo row counts as one. The sample row is not charged and diagnostic rows are not charged.

Worth doing the sum before you schedule it: all four boards every 15 minutes is roughly 15,000 topics a day, which is about $6 a day at this price. Hourly instead of quarter-hourly is about $1.50.

💡 What people use it for

• Building a time series of Chinese trending topics, by running it on a schedule and joining

snapshots on sentenceId.

• Spotting a topic on the way up rather than at its peak, using rank against peakRank.
• Watching the 社会榜 for the news stories that actually moved, separately from celebrity noise on

the 娱乐榜.

• Feeding word into a translation or summarisation step to get a daily read on Chinese attention

without speaking the language.

• Checking whether a brand moment reached the boards at all, and which board it landed on.

🚧 What it does not do

• No keyword search. Douyin's search needs a signed-in account, so this covers the hot boards

and nothing else.

• No videos per topic. Douyin does not publish the list of videos behind a topic to a

signed-out visitor. videoCount is a count, and a column of videos would be a column of guesses.

• No translation. word stays in Chinese. Everything else is a number or English.
• No live-room contents. liveRoomCount is a count.
• About 156 rows is the whole thing. There is no deeper history to page into. Depth comes from

running it repeatedly.

• Cover links expire in around a day.
• A 0 count can mean "not published", because of how Douyin returns those fields.
• Boards move under you. A snapshot is a snapshot, and boardActiveTime tells you which one.

🧭 Which social scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Douyin account? No. The boards are public and nothing is signed in.

Can I search Douyin for a keyword? Not from here, and not without an account. Douyin answers signed-out search requests by asking you to log in.

Why is the topic text in Chinese? Because that is how Douyin publishes it, and translating it here would mean shipping a guess. Translate word on your side if you need to.

Why does one row have no rank? That is the promo row Douyin pins above rank 1. It is flagged isPinned.

How often should I run it? Depends what you are after. The boards move every few minutes, hourly is enough for most trend tracking, and quarter-hourly is what you want if you are hunting the moment a topic breaks.

Is this legal? These are public rankings on public pages. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the board and the run ID. If you got a diagnostic row, its errorCode and hint usually name the problem on their own.