Hooklayer – Viral Content Intelligence for TikTok & YouTube

Turn any AI agent, workflow, or scraper into a viral-content strategist. Hooklayer gives you 7 read-only tools for scoring hooks, predicting virality, surfacing live trends, finding viral templates, and analyzing creators — all returning structured JSON with cited evidence and zero side effects.

This Actor runs the hosted Hooklayer intelligence engine on Apify, so you can call any Hooklayer tool from a scheduled task, an integration, or another Actor and get the results straight into an Apify dataset.

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What Hooklayer does

Short-form content lives or dies in the first two seconds. Hooklayer scores that moment — and the whole video — against real, cited signals instead of guesswork. Every score ships with a signals[] array of evidence, a would_fail_because counterfactual, and a quality health field, so you (or your agent) know why a piece of content will or won't pop.

Typical uses:

• Rank hooks before you publish — score multiple opening lines and keep the winner.
• Predict a video's virality — run an independent, adversarial check with confidence, cost, and action-class breakdowns.
• Ride live trends — surface what is spiking right now instead of last month's meta.
• Reverse-engineer winners — search viral templates and remix the structure for your niche.
• Size up a creator — analyze any TikTok/YouTube account and get a recommended_chain of follow-up actions your agent can execute.

Everything is read-only: no posting, no mutations, no side effects — safe to run in automated pipelines.

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How to use this Actor

1. Get a free API key. Sign up at hooklayer.dev/auth/signup — the free tier is enough to get started. Your key looks like hl_live_....
2. Discover the tools. Run the Actor once with List tools only enabled to get every tool's name and exact inputSchema into the dataset.
3. Run a tool. Set Tool to run (e.g. analyze_account) and Tool arguments (the JSON that tool expects), then run.

Input

Field	Type	Description
apiKey	string (secret)	Your Hooklayer API key (hl_live_...). Required.
tool	string	Tool to run, e.g. analyze_account. Leave empty to return the tool catalog.
toolInput	object	Arguments for the tool, as JSON.
listToolsOnly	boolean	Return the catalog of tools without calling one.
serverUrl	string	Advanced. Defaults to the hosted https://hooklayer.dev/api/mcp.

Example — discover the tools

{
  "apiKey": "hl_live_xxx",
  "listToolsOnly": true
}

Example — analyze a creator

{
  "apiKey": "hl_live_xxx",
  "tool": "analyze_account",
  "toolInput": { "handle": "@example", "platform": "tiktok" }
}

Field names inside toolInput follow each tool's own inputSchema — always check the catalog output first.

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Output

Each run writes to the default dataset. A tool call returns one record:

{
  "tool": "analyze_account",
  "input": { "handle": "@example", "platform": "tiktok" },
  "isError": false,
  "result": {
    "score": 82,
    "signals": ["..."],
    "would_fail_because": "...",
    "recommended_chain": ["predict_virality", "..."]
  }
}

Catalog runs write one record per tool with its name, description, and inputSchema.

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Why Hooklayer

• Evidence, not vibes — every score carries cited signals[] and a counterfactual.
• Agent-ready — recommended_chain fields tell an autonomous agent what to do next.
• Safe by design — 7 read-only tools, structured JSON, no mutations.
• Production-ready — MCP 2024-11-05, OAuth 2.1 + API-key auth, free tier to start.

Links: hooklayer.dev · GitHub · Glama listing

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Hooklayer is a hosted service; this Actor is a thin, open wrapper that authenticates to your Hooklayer account with your own API key. Your key is stored as an Apify secret and is never logged.