TikTok Search Scraper: Keywords, Hashtags, Creators & Spoken Transcripts (256MB Zero-Proxy)

TikTok Search Scraper (church_of_loujess/tiktok-search-scraper) is a high-speed, 256MB RAM, zero-proxy TikTok search API alternative built for influencer marketing teams, social listening pipelines, researchers, and AI/MCP agents.

Enter a list of search keywords or hashtags and receive structured TikTok video posts — including views, likes, comments, shares, bookmarks, creator/channel stats, sound/music metadata, subtitle tracks, decoded spoken transcripts (transcriptText), virality metrics (analytics), optional comment threads (commentList), and creator profiles (authorProfile) — in seconds.

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Why Choose This TikTok Search Scraper?

Feature	Legacy / Competitor TikTok Search Scrapers	This Actor (church_of_loujess/tiktok-search-scraper)
Free-Plan Restrictions	Artificially capped at 10 results/run & 5 runs/month	Zero artificial caps — use your full Apify credits freely
Expansion Pools (suggest, hashtag, music)	Locked behind paid Apify tiers	Included for all users at no extra gate
Comments (commentList) & Profiles (authorProfile)	Charged as separate per-comment / per-profile add-on events	Included — toggle on anytime without extra add-on event charges
Spoken Video Transcripts (transcriptText)	Raw expiring CDN .vtt links only	Automatically downloads & decodes WebVTT into clean plain text for LLMs/RAG
Memory Footprint	1,024 MB – 4,096 MB	256 MB RAM (1/16th the compute cost)
Schema Compatibility	Standard TikTok scraper JSON	100% drop-in compatible (views, likes, channel.*, video.*, song.*, subtitleInformation)

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What Data Does TikTok Search Scraper Extract?

One structured dataset item per video, 100% compatible with existing TikTok scraper pipelines plus RAG/lead enrichment:

• Engagement: views, likes, comments, shares, bookmarks
• Post Metadata: id, title (full caption), hashtags, uploadedAt (Unix timestamp), uploadedAtFormatted (ISO-8601), postPage (permanent URL)
• Creator / Channel (channel): id, name, username, avatar, verified, url, followers, following, videos, likes
• Video Stream (video): width, height, ratio, duration, url (direct MP4 stream URL), cover, thumbnail
• Sound / Music (song): id (number), musicId (exact 19-digit string ID), title, artist, album, duration, cover
• Subtitles & Spoken Transcript:
  • subtitleInformation: Array of caption tracks (caption_format, caption_length, lang, language_code, is_auto_generated, url, url_list, version)
  • transcriptText: Clean, timestamp-stripped spoken transcript text decoded directly from the WebVTT track (when includeTranscriptText: true)
• Virality & Creator Lead Analytics (analytics):
  • engagementRatePct: ((likes + comments + shares + bookmarks) / views) * 100
  • viralityViewsToFollowersRatio: views / followers (identifies breakout viral posts from emerging creators)
  • isAiGenerated: Boolean flag for TikTok AIGC-labeled content
  • extractedEmails: Business emails extracted from captions or creator bios
• Opt-In Enrichment (No Extra Add-On Event Fees):
  • commentList (when commentsPerPost > 0): Top comments with author details, likes, language, pinned status, and nested replies (maxRepliesPerComment)
  • authorProfile (when includeAuthorProfile: true): Full creator profile (signature bio, bioLink, createTime, language, friends, isOrganization, ttSeller, commerceUser, commerceCategory, secUid, roomId)

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Expansion Mode & 10x Creator Discovery (expansion)

Set expansion to harvest additional discovery pools seeded automatically from each keyword's search results:

• suggest — Harvests search suggestions related to your keyword and runs each suggestion through TikTok search (expansion_source: "suggest").
• hashtag — Crawls the keyword's primary hashtag feed plus the top 5 co-occurring hashtags discovered in the search results (expansion_source: "hashtag").
• music — Crawls the feeds of the top 5 sounds used in the search results, filtered by relevanceThreshold (expansion_source: "music").

Combine "expansion": ["suggest", "hashtag", "music"] with "uniqueAuthors": true to emit one video per unique creator (channel.id) for large-scale influencer discovery.

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Output Example

{
  "inputSource": "artificial intelligence",
  "id": "7400028062320020768",
  "title": "Humanity's smartest invention might also be its last. Superintelligent AI could be our dream come true... #kurzgesagt #sciencetok #ai #artificialintelligence",
  "views": 122700,
  "likes": 10000,
  "comments": 134,
  "shares": 221,
  "bookmarks": 776,
  "hashtags": ["kurzgesagt", "sciencetok", "ai", "artificialintelligence"],
  "channel": {
    "id": "6807723105163871238",
    "name": "Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell",
    "username": "kurz_gesagt",
    "avatar": "https://p16-common-sign.tiktokcdn-eu.com/...",
    "verified": true,
    "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@kurz_gesagt",
    "followers": 2000000,
    "following": 42,
    "videos": 506,
    "likes": 30000000
  },
  "collabInfo": null,
  "uploadedAt": 1722953306,
  "uploadedAtFormatted": "2024-08-06T14:08:26.000Z",
  "video": {
    "width": 576,
    "height": 1024,
    "ratio": "540p",
    "duration": 56,
    "url": "https://v16-webapp-prime.tiktok.com/...",
    "cover": "https://p16-common-sign.tiktokcdn-eu.com/...",
    "thumbnail": "https://p16-common-sign.tiktokcdn-eu.com/..."
  },
  "song": {
    "id": 7400028146168319000,
    "musicId": "7400028146168318752",
    "title": "original sound",
    "artist": "Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell",
    "album": null,
    "duration": 56,
    "cover": "https://p16-common-sign.tiktokcdn-eu.com/..."
  },
  "subtitleInformation": [
    {
      "caption_format": "webvtt",
      "caption_length": 1802,
      "lang": "eng-US",
      "language_code": "eng",
      "is_auto_generated": true,
      "url": "https://v16-webapp.tiktokcdn-eu.com/...",
      "url_list": ["https://v16-webapp.tiktokcdn-eu.com/..."],
      "version": "1:big_caption"
    }
  ],
  "transcriptText": "Humanity's smartest invention might also be its last. Superintelligent AI could be our dream come true or our worst nightmare...",
  "postPage": "https://www.tiktok.com/@kurz_gesagt/video/7400028062320020768",
  "poi": null,
  "keyword": "artificial intelligence",
  "analytics": {
    "engagementRatePct": 9.07,
    "viralityViewsToFollowersRatio": 0.06,
    "isAiGenerated": false,
    "extractedEmails": []
  }
}

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Usage via Python, JavaScript & MCP

Python (apify-client)

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("church_of_loujess/tiktok-search-scraper").call(
    run_input={
        "keywords": ["ai tools", "skincare routine"],
        "maxItems": 50,
        "sortType": "MOST_LIKED",
        "includeTranscriptText": True,
        "commentsPerPost": 10,
        "includeAuthorProfile": True,
    },
    memory_mbytes=256,
)
items = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

Claude Desktop / Cursor MCP Server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@apify/actors-mcp-server",
        "--actors",
        "church_of_loujess/tiktok-search-scraper"
      ],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}