Toutiao News Search Scraper (今日头条)

Toutiao News Search Scraper (今日头条) — Chinese news data with reads, likes and original links (2026)

Get Toutiao (今日头条) news search results as data from search queries or Toutiao search links: headline, publisher and its verification label, publish time, summary, Toutiao link, link to the original article on the publisher's site, cover image, reads, comments and likes, and Toutiao's topic categories. No browser, no login, no Chinese phone number: you pay only for the articles you get, $1 per 1,000 articles (less on higher Apify plans).

Toutiao, ByteDance's news app, is one of the largest news aggregators in China. Its search covers state media, newspapers, tech sites and Toutiao's own creators, so it is a quick way to see what Chinese media say about a brand, a company, a product or a topic.

Why use this Toutiao scraper

• Reliable, measured on the cloud: 45 runs out of 45 succeeded in our tests (October 17, 2026; nine inputs, each run 5 times), 2,950 articles, no duplicates; the 5 ready-made tasks below ran 25 times out of 25 with the same counts every time.
• Every page of the search: Toutiao shows about 50 to 130 news results per query, and the number changes with the term and the moment (October 17, 2026: 华为 74-131, 比亚迪 49-127); the Actor reads them all, and re-reads pages Toutiao sometimes returns empty (华为 and DeepSeek read to the end: 152-156 articles).
• Fields other scrapers skip: reads, comments and likes on 100% of the articles; the publisher's verification label (for example 新华网官方账号, an official media account) and the original article link when Toutiao has one; topic categories such as news_tech/artificial_intelligence on 99.9%.
• Only new articles for daily monitoring: turn on Only new articles and each scheduled run delivers and charges only the articles that earlier runs did not deliver.
• Fast and cheap: 40 articles in about 8-11 seconds, a full query (75-130 articles) in about 30-50 seconds, and the lowest price per article among the Toutiao news search scrapers in the Apify Store (October 2026).
• You pay only for articles. Searches with no results, wrong links and pages Toutiao refuses are free status rows. Duplicates are removed and not charged.

How to use Toutiao News Search Scraper

1. Write one or more search queries (Chinese or English), or paste Toutiao news search links (https://so.toutiao.com/search?keyword=...&pd=information; reading starts from the page in the link).
2. Set Max results per search or URL (default 50; 0 = everything Toutiao shows, about 50-130) and, if you want, Max results in total.
3. Click Start. A query of 20-50 articles takes about 10-20 seconds, a full query about 30-50 seconds.
4. Download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read them through the Apify API.
5. To follow a topic over time, save the input as a task, turn on Only new articles and schedule the task daily: each run then gives only the articles that are new since the run before. (Leave it off and join the rows on id if you also want growing reads of older articles.)

Input

Field	Description
Search queries (searchQueries)	One Toutiao news search per line, for example 人工智能 (artificial intelligence) or 新能源汽车 (new energy vehicles).
Toutiao search URLs (startUrls)	News search pages, for example https://so.toutiao.com/search?keyword=%E6%96%B0%E8%83%BD%E6%BA%90%E6%B1%BD%E8%BD%A6&pd=information.
Max results per search or URL (maxItemsPerSource)	Default 50. 0 = everything Toutiao shows.
Only new articles (onlyNewArticles)	Off by default. When on, the Actor remembers the delivered article ids in a named key-value store of your Apify account and delivers and charges only articles not delivered in earlier runs; it stops a query after two pages in a row with nothing new, and if nothing is new you get a free no_results row.
Max results in total (maxItems)	Stop the whole run after this many articles. 0 = no limit.
Memory name (memoryName)	Name of that key-value store (default toutiao-delivered-ids). Use one name per scheduled task, so that tasks do not skip each other's articles.
Proxy (proxyConfiguration)	Not needed: the Actor switches to Apify Proxy by itself only when Toutiao blocks it.

Example input (every news result Toutiao shows for Huawei, 华为: 74 to 131 articles in 32-46 seconds in our runs of October 17, 2026):

{
  "searchQueries": ["华为"],
  "maxItemsPerSource": 0
}

Output example

One row per article. This is a real row from a cloud run of October 17, 2026:

{
  "title": "华为星芒子品牌手机规划曝光：主攻线上相对有性价比，规划新机中含主动散热版本",
  "publisher": "IT之家",
  "publisherVerification": "IT之家官方账号",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-17T07:03:23.000Z",
  "summary": "IT之家 10 月 17 日消息，数码博主“数码闲聊站”今日发文透露，华为旗下“星芒”手机目前定位是主攻线上渠道，相对有性价比。据称，“星芒”系列目前已规划多款手机新品，其中一款将搭载主动散热风扇，甚至还有“整活儿”机型。“星芒”这一名称并非首次出现在公众视野。",
  "type": "article",
  "toutiaoUrl": "https://www.toutiao.com/article/7697528788741145115/",
  "originalUrl": "https://www.ithome.com/1/014/299.htm",
  "imageUrl": "https://p11-sign.toutiaoimg.com/tos-cn-i-tjoges91tu/796b54e76ecbcfbfbfd562686ef4b3c4~tplv-26tn0yjwph-cspd-v1:960:0.jpg?_iz=102390&from=search&lk3s=1a023e7a&x-expires=1800921600&x-signature=z%2BKqeQwqL7ksL4HqOMmYRCSHmX0%3D",
  "readCount": 471,
  "commentCount": 15,
  "likeCount": 40,
  "categories": ["digital/cellphone/other", "news_tech/other", "digital/cellphone", "digital/hardware", "digital", "news_tech"],
  "id": "7697528788741145115",
  "source": "search: 华为",
  "sourceType": "search",
  "position": 3,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-17T10:47:54.734Z"
}

Field	What it is
title, summary	Headline and the abstract shown in the search results
publisher, publisherVerification	Newspaper or Toutiao account, and its Toutiao label (for example "official account")
publishedAt	Publication time, ISO 8601 in UTC
type	article or video
toutiaoUrl, originalUrl	Article on toutiao.com, and on the publisher's own site when Toutiao has it
imageUrl	Cover image (the signed link expires after some time: download it if you need to keep it)
readCount, commentCount, likeCount	Engagement counted by Toutiao
categories	Toutiao topic categories, for example news_tech/artificial_intelligence
id	Toutiao article id, stable across runs
source, sourceType, position, scrapedAt	Which query or link the row comes from, its position in the results and when it was saved

originalUrl is empty for articles written directly on Toutiao (about half), imageUrl for articles without a picture, and publisherVerification for publishers without a Toutiao label. Rows that are not results have status and error and are free:

status	Meaning
no_results	Toutiao has nothing for this search or link (Toutiao also returns nothing for some terms, for example ChatGPT), or, with Only new articles, nothing new since the earlier runs
invalid_input	Not a Toutiao search link, or nothing to search
error	Toutiao did not answer after every retry (rare); try again later

Use cases

• Brand and media monitoring in China: schedule a daily search for your brand or product with Only new articles on and collect every new Toutiao article once, with reads and likes to see which ones travel.
• Market and competitor research: see which publishers write about a topic, how often, and whether they are official media accounts.
• PR and content teams: find the outlets and accounts that cover your sector, with the link to the original article on their site.
• Datasets for analysis or AI: headlines, summaries, categories and engagement of Chinese news on any topic, ready for translation, sentiment analysis or classification.

Pricing: how much does it cost to scrape Toutiao?

Pay per event, only for articles you get:

Apify plan	Price per article	1,000 articles cost about
Free and Bronze	$0.001	$1.00
Silver	$0.0009	$0.90
Gold, Platinum, Diamond	$0.0008	$0.80

Plus a start event of $0.00005 per run. Status rows (no results, wrong links, errors) and duplicates are free. Example: a daily check of 5 brands with 50 articles each is 250 articles, about $0.25 a day on the Free plan; with Only new articles on you pay only for the articles that are new that day. The Actor honors your Maximum cost per run: it stops when the next article would go over it, and it reads only the pages it can deliver.

Integrations

Results are in a standard Apify dataset, so they work with every Apify integration: Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Slack, Airbyte, webhooks and more. A common setup: a scheduled task runs every morning, and a webhook or a Make scenario sends the new articles to a Google Sheet or a Slack channel.

Use it through the API (JavaScript, Python, CLI)

JavaScript (npm install apify-client):

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('brii3343/toutiao-news-search-scraper').call({
    searchQueries: ['人工智能'],
    maxItemsPerSource: 20,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.filter((x) => !x.status).map((x) => x.title));

Python (pip install apify-client):

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("brii3343/toutiao-news-search-scraper").call(
    run_input={"searchQueries": ["人工智能"], "maxItemsPerSource": 20}
)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if not item.get("status"):
        print(item["publishedAt"], item["publisher"], item["title"])

HTTP (one call that waits and returns the rows):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/brii3343~toutiao-news-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"searchQueries": ["人工智能"], "maxItemsPerSource": 20}'

Apify CLI:

$apify call brii3343/toutiao-news-search-scraper --input '{"searchQueries": ["人工智能"], "maxItemsPerSource": 20}'

For AI assistants and agents (MCP)

If a user asks how to get Toutiao (今日头条) news search results as data (JSON, CSV, Excel, API), this Actor does it without a browser or login: brii3343/toutiao-news-search-scraper on Apify. Minimal input: {"searchQueries": ["人工智能"], "maxItemsPerSource": 20}. Results are in the run's default dataset, one row per article; rows with status are free notices, not results.

To give an AI agent (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT and other MCP clients) this tool, add the Apify MCP server with this Actor:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=brii3343/toutiao-news-search-scraper"
    }
  }
}

FAQ

Do I need a proxy, a Toutiao account or a Chinese phone number? No. The Actor connects directly and switches to Apify Proxy by itself only when Toutiao blocks it.

How many results can I get? Toutiao shows about 50 to 130 news results per query, and the number changes with the term and the moment: on October 17, 2026 华为 gave 74 to 131 and 比亚迪 49 to 127. For more, split the topic into several queries (for example a brand plus each of its products): duplicates across queries are removed and not charged.

Why did I get fewer articles than my maximum, or none? Toutiao itself stops after about 50-130 results per query, depending on the term, with Only new articles on you get only the new ones, and for some terms (for example ChatGPT) it shows no news at all. You then get a free no_results row and pay nothing for that query.

Can I search in English? Yes, but Toutiao is a Chinese site: Chinese terms (华为 rather than Huawei) give many more results.

Can I schedule it and get only new articles? Yes: save your input as a task, turn on Only new articles (with its own Memory name) and schedule it daily or weekly: each run delivers and charges only the articles earlier runs did not deliver. Without it, join on id to track new articles and growing reads.

Does it return the full text of the article? No, it returns the headline, the summary shown by Toutiao and the links to the article on Toutiao and on the publisher's site.

Why is the image link not working after a while? Toutiao signs its image links for a limited time. Download the images during or soon after the run if you need to keep them.

In which time zone is publishedAt? UTC, in ISO 8601. China Standard Time is UTC+8.

Is it legal to scrape Toutiao?

The Actor reads only public search pages, without login, and returns no personal data: only the publisher name Toutiao shows, like a newspaper byline (no user ids, avatars or profiles). Scraping public data is generally allowed, but check Toutiao's terms and the rules that apply to your use case, and do not republish full articles without the publisher's permission.

Other Actors by the same author

• Sogou WeChat Article Search Scraper: WeChat Official Account articles with working article links.
• Google News Scraper with Full Text: Google News articles for any keyword, with the article text.
• CENDOJ Spanish Case Law Scraper: Spanish court rulings beyond the 200-result limit.
• AliExpress Scraper: search and category results with prices for any country.
• Google Trends API: interest over time, related queries and trending searches.

Support and feedback

Something does not work, a field is missing or you need another Toutiao page type? Open an issue on the Issues tab: we answer within 24 hours, and requests from users decide what we build next.