📰 Toutiao News Tracker — China News Hot Board + Search (今日头条)

Optional delivery: Send results straight to your own Notion database or Supabase table in the same run, via Apify's native MCP connectors — the Actor never sees your credentials. One-click connect: Notion or Supabase. Leave blank to get the dataset as usual.

Pull Toutiao (今日头条) — ByteDance's flagship news aggregator and one of China's most-read news products — as clean structured data. Toutiao is the China news-trend pulse that almost no Western scraper reaches: it is heavily personalized, anti-bot-defended and signed-URL-gated, and this actor clears it to return the live hot board (热榜) and keyword news search results with rank, headline, hot value, source, abstract, published time and direct article URLs as flat JSON / CSV / Excel. No login, no Chinese phone number, no Toutiao API key.

If you do China news monitoring, APAC media intelligence, public-opinion / sentiment tracking, or just want to know what China is reading right now, this is the feed — and it is genuinely hard to source anywhere else.

📊 Sample Output

Real headlines returned by this actor for mode: hot — every row below comes straight from a live run on the Chinese-language Toutiao hot board (今日头条热榜):

#	Hot Headline (热榜)	Hot Value	Label
1	遇见小面创始人道歉	1,422万	hot
2	主持人：C罗正毁掉葡萄牙夺世界杯机会	1,287万	new
3	1至5月份国家铁路发送货物16.7亿吨	1,165万	—
4	美伊达成和平协议	1,054万	hot
5	"哈尔滨制造"强势打破美国垄断	954万	new

Each headline also carries a cluster_id, a topic image, and a direct url to the Toutiao article/topic page — ready for media-monitoring dashboards, sentiment pipelines, or Chinese-language RAG.

What you can do with it

• China news monitoring — capture the live hot board on a schedule to track the national news cycle and breaking topics.
• Brand / PR monitoring — run mode: "search" on your brand or competitors to pull matching news articles with source, abstract and published time.
• Public-opinion / sentiment research — feed headline + abstract text into a sentiment or clustering pipeline for China-market analysis.
• Chinese-language RAG / AI-training data — clean, deduplicated news records with source attribution.

What you get

Per article, you get a flat, typed record:

• Ranking — rank, hot_value (numeric heat score), label (e.g. hot, new)
• Headline — title (Chinese), abstract where exposed
• Source — source, publisher, published_at where exposed (search mode / detail-backed items)
• Engagement — comment_count, read_count where exposed (search mode)
• Reference — url (direct article/topic link), cluster_id, image, item_id, keyword, mode, scraped_at

Note: hot-board mode pulls Toutiao's live hot_board, which exposes rank, title, hot_value, label, image and url for every topic. Per-article fields like source, abstract, published_at, comment_count and read_count are populated in search mode (which targets individual articles) or where the board surfaces them. We never fabricate fields the source doesn't return.

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	hot	hot = live Toutiao hot board (今日头条热榜); search = keyword news search
query	string	科技	Keyword to search (Chinese or English). Required for mode: "search", ignored for hot
maxArticles	integer	50	Hard cap on articles returned and charged (1–100)
proxyConfiguration	object	RESIDENTIAL	Apify proxy. RESIDENTIAL recommended for reliable access from outside China
notionConnector / notionParentId	string	—	Optional MCP delivery to your Notion workspace
supabaseConnector / supabaseTable / supabaseProjectId	string	—	Optional MCP delivery into your Supabase project
deliveryDedup	boolean	true	Skip records already delivered in a previous run (scheduled runs push only new items)

Sample inputs

1. The live Toutiao hot board (what China is reading now)

{ "mode": "hot", "maxArticles": 20 }

2. Search Toutiao news by keyword (with source + abstract)

{ "mode": "search", "query": "新能源汽车", "maxArticles": 40 }

📊 Sample Output (JSON)

One representative mode: hot record, straight from a live run:

{
  "mode": "hot",
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "遇见小面创始人道歉",
  "url": "https://www.toutiao.com/trending/7650640367843180563/",
  "hot_value": "14224949",
  "label": "hot",
  "cluster_id": 7650640367843181000,
  "image": "https://p9-sign.toutiaoimg.com/top-static-files-outer/breaknews/...",
  "source": null,
  "abstract": null,
  "published_at": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-15T04:15:24Z"
}

How it works

Toutiao (今日头条) personalizes heavily and protects its feeds with signed URLs and anti-bot defenses that block datacenter IPs. This actor routes through Apify residential proxy and reads the official hot_board endpoint (toutiao.com/hot-event/hot-board) and, in search mode, the Toutiao search endpoint (so.toutiao.com/search) directly — no brittle DOM scraping, no heavy rendering. That keeps compute (and your bill) low while returning clean flat fields. The maxArticles cap is a hard ceiling. Optionally deliver results straight to Notion or Supabase via MCP connectors.

💰 Pricing example

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for articles that actually land in your dataset:

• Actor start: $0.005
• Per article: $0.025

A 100-article pull = $0.005 + (100 × $0.025) = $2.505. A quick 12-headline hot-board check = $0.005 + (12 × $0.025) = $0.305. No monthly minimum, no seats.

⚖️ Legal & ToS

This actor reads only Toutiao's public, unauthenticated hot board and search results — the same headlines any visitor sees without logging in. It does not access private accounts, personalized recommendation internals, or anything behind authentication. You are responsible for using the output in line with Toutiao's terms and your local regulations.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Toutiao account or a Chinese phone number? No. The actor works entirely off Toutiao's public hot board and search — no login, no registration, no Chinese SIM.

Is this social media or news? Toutiao is a news aggregator, so this is a China news-trend feed — the news counterpart to social platforms like Weibo or Douyin. Pair them for the full picture.

Why are source, abstract or published_at sometimes empty? The hot board surfaces rank, title, hot_value, label and url for every topic. Richer per-article fields appear in search mode, which targets individual articles. We never fabricate fields the source doesn't expose.

How do I get full article metadata instead of just the hot board? Set mode: "search" with a query. That returns individual articles with source, abstract and published time populated.

Can results go straight into Notion or Supabase? Yes — set notionConnector (and optionally notionParentId) or supabaseConnector and the actor writes each article into your destination in the same run, without ever seeing your credentials.

Why did I get fewer articles than maxArticles? The hot board or search simply had fewer results. maxArticles is a ceiling, not a target.

🔗 Related actors — NexGenData China social-listening fleet

Pair Toutiao news-trend data with the rest of the NexGenData Chinese-social fleet for full cross-platform coverage:

• Weibo Hot Search Tracker — China's #1 social-trending barometer (微博热搜榜), the social counterpart to Toutiao's news board.
• RedNote (Xiaohongshu) Scraper — trending posts, feeds and notes from Xiaohongshu (小红书 / RedNote) for consumer-intent signal.
• Douyin Trending Tracker — the live Douyin (抖音 / Chinese TikTok) hot list for short-video trends.
• Bilibili Video Search — keyword search across Bilibili (B站), China's long-form video / gaming hub.
• Zhihu Q&A Tracker — Zhihu (知乎) hot list and Q&A mining, China's long-form knowledge community.
• Kuaishou Trending Tracker — trending short-video signal from Kuaishou (快手).
• Douban Tracker — China movie/TV ratings and hot lists from Douban (豆瓣).
• China Trends Tracker — cross-platform Chinese trend roll-up (Weibo / Baidu / Toutiao / Douyin).
• Chinese Social Signals MCP — MCP server that plugs the whole Chinese-social fleet into Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor.