WeChat (微信公众号) Article Scraper — Keyless Content & Discovery

Scrape WeChat official-account (公众号) articles into clean datasets — by keyword, by account name, or by URL — with no login, no account, no cookies and no API key. You get the title, account, publish time, full article text and images, discovered automatically through Sogou Weixin and read from the article's own public page.

🔥 What is it — and when should you use it?

WeChat official accounts are where Chinese brands, media and experts publish. This Actor gives you two things in one, keyless:

1. Zero-config discovery — type a keyword (e.g. 人工智能) or an account name and it finds recent public articles via Sogou Weixin, so you don't need to know the URLs.
2. Full article content — for each article it reads the public mp.weixin.qq.com page and returns title, account name, account id (biz), author, publish time, summary, full body text and image URLs.

Use it for content & competitive intelligence, brand monitoring, trend research, dataset building for NLP, and tracking what a topic or account is publishing.

🤖 Use with AI agents

Pay-per-event and agent-friendly: run with a single keyword, or pass article URLs. Each result row is one clean article record. Point any MCP-enabled assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) at it on the Apify MCP server, or call the Apify API. You pay only per delivered article; empty runs are free.

📋 Overview

Discovery	weixin.sogou.com (keyword / account search)
Content	mp.weixin.qq.com (the article's own public page)
Auth	None — no login, cookie, account or API key
Method	Pure HTTP over a rotating Apify proxy exit; no browser
Output	One article row per delivered article
Billing	Pay per delivered article

✨ Features

• 🔓 Keyless — no login, no account, no cookies, no third-party service.
• 🧭 Zero-config discovery — a keyword or account name is enough; no URLs needed.
• 📄 Full content — title, account, account id (biz), author, publish time, summary, full body text, images.
• 🧱 No browser — pure HTTP; Sogou's result links are resolved to the real article in-process.
• 🔁 Resilient — a fresh proxy exit per request; throttled exits rotate.
• 🧭 Honest scope — every field is null when the page did not carry it; never a fake value. Read/like counts are not scraped (see below).

🎬 Quick Start

Discover by keyword:

{ "queries": ["人工智能"], "maxArticlesPerQuery": 10 }

By account name:

{ "queries": ["量子位"], "maxArticlesPerQuery": 10 }

Specific article URLs:

{ "articleUrls": ["https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"] }

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	Keywords or account names to discover articles via Sogou.
articleUrls	array	Direct mp.weixin.qq.com/s (or Sogou /link) URLs. Works alone.
maxArticlesPerQuery	integer	Cap per query. Default 10.
maxPages	integer	Sogou result pages per query (10 each). Default 1.
maxArticles	integer	Total cap across the run. Default 50.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy; datacenter is enough, switch to residential only if blocked.

📤 Output

Each row is one article:

{
  "resultType": "article",
  "title": "量子位2026人工智能年度榜单,正式启动!",
  "account": "量子位",
  "biz": "MzIzNjc1NzUzMw==",
  "author": "关注前沿科技",
  "publishTime": "2026-10-28T01:30:00.000Z",
  "publishTimestamp": 1793180000,
  "url": "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
  "summary": "…",
  "cover": "https://mmbiz.qpic.cn/…",
  "images": ["https://mmbiz.qpic.cn/…"],
  "imageCount": 7,
  "contentText": "…full article body text…",
  "contentLength": 2382,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-28T…"
}

Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML.

🧾 Data table

Field	Description
title	Article title
account	Official-account name (公众号)
biz	Account id (__biz)
author	Byline (null when none)
publishTime / publishTimestamp	Publish time (ISO + unix)
url	Article URL
summary	Article summary (null when none)
cover	Cover image URL
images / imageCount	In-body image URLs
contentText / contentLength	Full body text + length

🧠 How it works

Discovery uses Sogou Weixin's public article search. Each result is a temporary Sogou link that the Actor resolves to the real mp.weixin.qq.com article URL in-process (no browser — it joins the page's own redirect parts). The article page is then read directly for its public fields. No login, no signature, no CAPTCHA service.

🧪 Data quality — measured (2026-10-28)

On 3 fresh articles discovered keyless over a datacenter exit: title, account, biz, publish time, body text and images filled 3/3; summary 2/3 and author 2/3 (the rest were honestly null — the page carried no summary / byline). Bodies ranged 875–2,382 characters.

💼 Use cases

• Content & competitive intelligence — what a topic or account is publishing.
• Brand monitoring — track mentions across official accounts.
• Trend research & NLP datasets — full article text at scale.

🔗 Integration

Schedule it, connect to Make / Zapier / n8n, or call the Apify API. Each run's counts are written to the SOURCE_REPORT key-value record.

📊 Pricing

Pay per delivered article. Empty runs are free. See the pricing panel for the current rate.

❓ FAQ

• Does it need my WeChat login or cookies? No. It never logs in and never asks you for an account, cookie or proxy.
• Does it return read counts, likes or 在看? No. Those come only from WeChat's signed mobile endpoint and are deliberately out of scope — we never fake them.
• Why is a field null? The article page did not carry it (e.g. no byline or summary). It is never faked.

🐛 Troubleshooting

• A run returned little/nothing: a Sogou exit was rate-limited — rerun (exits rotate) or reduce the number of queries.
• An article URL was skipped: it was not a mp.weixin.qq.com / Sogou link, or the article was deleted.

🚧 What it does not do

It reads publicly served pages. It does not log in, does not scrape private content, does not return read/like/share counts, and does not fabricate missing fields.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape WeChat articles?

The Actor reads only publicly served, non-personal article content (title, account, text, images). Use the data in line with the sources' terms and applicable law; do not store personal data without a lawful basis.

🤝 Support & contact

Questions or a custom need? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.