Xiaohongshu Influencer Finder — Fast, No Residential Proxy

Discover public Xiaohongshu (RedNote / 小红书) creators from commercial-interest Explore feeds, deduplicate them by creator ID, and enrich each lead with public profile data.

This Actor uses lightweight server-rendered HTML over direct HTTP. It does not start a browser, ask for a login cookie, call a paid third-party data API, or select residential proxies.

Result-integrity rule: a complete run with 0 valid creator rows finishes as FAILED, not as a misleading empty success.

What it returns

• Creator ID, canonical profile URL, nickname, Xiaohongshu ID, avatar, bio, public location label, and profile tags
• Followers, following, and “likes + collections” counters
• Exactness flags and lower bounds whenever Xiaohongshu displays compact values such as 2.5万
• Verification type/text when publicly rendered
• Discovery categories, unique discovered-note count, and the strongest sampled note with likes, cover, type, and URL
• One dataset row per unique creator

Quick start

{
  "categories": ["cosmetics", "fashion", "food", "travel", "fitness"],
  "maxCreators": 100,
  "minFollowers": 1000,
  "minSampleNoteLikes": 100,
  "keywords": [],
  "connectionMode": "DIRECT",
  "maxConcurrency": 8,
  "maxDiscoveryPages": 50,
  "maxRequestRetries": 2
}

Available categories are recommend, cosmetics, fashion, food, travel, fitness, household, career, movie, gaming, and love.

keywords is an optional local OR filter over nickname, bio, tags, verification text, and sampled-note title. It is intentionally not described as full Xiaohongshu keyword search: the platform's own user-search API is login-gated, while this Actor remains cookieless.

Performance and reliability

The data path has two stages:

1. Public Explore pages are reshuffled and sampled until the candidate target or safety cap is reached.
2. Creator IDs are deduplicated before concurrent lightweight mobile profile requests.

In the pre-release direct-IP benchmark on 2026-08-06:

• 194 public notes produced 193 unique creator IDs in 5 seconds.
• 30 profile enrichments completed 30/30 with 0 blocks in 3.17 seconds at concurrency 6.
• Those 30 profile responses transferred 1.27 MB total.

Actual throughput and available results can change with Xiaohongshu's public feed, selected filters, network conditions, and site changes. STATS records the real request count, response bytes, blocks, results, and runtime for every run.

No residential proxy

Only two connection modes exist:

• DIRECT — the Actor container's datacenter IP; default and lowest overhead.
• APIFY_DATACENTER — Apify datacenter proxy sessions for rotation.

There is no residential-proxy option and no arbitrary custom proxy input.

Pricing design

The Store rate is $0.0025 per valid creator for paid Apify plans ($2.50 per 1,000) and $0.003 on the Free plan, plus a $0.0005 Actor-start event. Apify platform usage is passed through to the run owner. Because the Actor has no residential traffic or paid upstream API, every billed row keeps a positive margin after Apify's 20% Store fee.

Only valid creator rows written to the default dataset are result-billed. Restrictive filters can return fewer than maxCreators; the maximum is a cap, not a promise that the public feed contains that many matching creators.

Counter accuracy

For plain public counters such as 1664, the Actor sets followers: 1664 and followersIsExact: true. For compact public values such as 22.5万, it preserves followersText: "22.5万", reports followersLowerBound: 225000, and sets followersIsExact: false; it does not invent hidden precision.

minFollowers uses the exact value or public lower bound, so a creator only passes when the displayed data safely reaches the threshold.

Local development

npm install
npm test
npm run test:live

The live check uses a small direct-IP sample and does not need an Apify Proxy or Xiaohongshu cookie.

Responsible use

Collect only public data and use it in compliance with Xiaohongshu's terms and applicable privacy/data-protection law. Public creator fields may still be personal data; minimize retention and redistribution. This Actor does not access private accounts, hidden contact details, or logged-in surfaces.