🇨🇳 Weibo Hot Search Tracker — 微博热搜 API & Trend Monitor

Track the Weibo Hot Search board (微博热搜榜) — the single most-watched social-trending barometer in China, refreshing its top-50 ranked topics every minute. Each topic ships with a heat score, category, the 新/热/沸 status flags Weibo uses to mark new/hot/boiling stories, pinyin, and a best-effort English gloss so non-Mandarin analysts can read the board at a glance. Brand and PR teams use it as a real-time crisis early-warning system; consumer-research and China-watcher teams use it as a daily pulse on what 1B+ Chinese users are talking about.

It's a Hootsuite-style China social-listening signal at pay-per-run pricing — no seat license, no annual contract, no minimum commitment.

📊 Sample Output

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Why the Weibo Hot Search matters

Weibo (微博) is the closest thing China has to Twitter/X, and its Hot Search board (热搜榜) carries enormous cultural and commercial weight. A topic that climbs into the top 5 will, within minutes, ripple across WeChat groups, Douyin and Xiaohongshu cross-posts and shape what hundreds of millions of consumers are talking about that day. For brand, PR, marketing and consumer-research teams, the board is the fastest read on Chinese public attention available anywhere.

The problem: Weibo doesn't publish a clean API, the on-page render uses Sina's visitor-cookie token dance, and most "China social listening" vendors charge five figures a year per seat for what is fundamentally a structured read of 50 rows of public JSON. This actor closes that gap — keyword board in, clean ranked rows out.

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What you get

Run the actor and you receive a clean JSON dataset, one record per Weibo hot-search topic:

{
  "rank": 1,
  "keyword": "某品牌道歉",
  "keyword_pinyin": "mou pin pai dao qian",
  "keyword_english_translation": "Brand apologizes",
  "category": "society",
  "heat_score": 2845013,
  "is_hot": true,
  "is_new": false,
  "weibo_url": "https://s.weibo.com/weibo?q=%E6%9F%90%E5%93%81%E7%89%8C%E9%81%93%E6%AD%89&Refer=hot_search",
  "as_of_timestamp": "2026-06-29T08:00:00Z",
  "data_source": "weibo.com/ajax/side/hotSearch"
}

That's everything you need to read the board programmatically: rank and keyword, a numeric heat score, the canonical category, the 新/热/沸 status surfaced as is_new / is_hot, pinyin, a best-effort English translation, a deep link to the topic page, and an as_of_timestamp so you can build a time-series.

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Input

Input	Type	Description
limit	integer	Max trending topics to return (1–50). Use 10 for a quick smoke test, 50 for the full board.
category	enum	all, entertainment, society, politics, sports, tech, finance, celebrity.
include_translation	boolean	If true, fills keyword_english_translation via a free public translation endpoint. Adds 1-2s per topic; disable for cheaper, more reliable runs.
include_government_topics	boolean	Include the 1-3 state-pinned hotgovs topics at the top of the dataset.
proxyConfiguration	proxy	Apify proxy. RESIDENTIAL recommended (Weibo applies geographic rate limits); the actor auto-falls-back to direct fetch if proxy negotiation fails.

Every property has a default and a prefill, so the actor runs with no input at all.

Sample input

{
  "limit": 50,
  "category": "all",
  "include_translation": true,
  "include_government_topics": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

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Use cases

• Brand & PR — real-time crisis early warning. Diff the board against your brand and competitor names; a PR issue typically surfaces as a 热搜 topic hours before mainstream Chinese media picks it up.
• Consumer research — daily attention pulse. A clean daily snapshot of the dominant conversations among Chinese consumers, by category.
• Social listening — emerging-theme detection. Schedule the actor and build a time-series of trending-topic categories to spot themes as they form.
• China-watching — amplification telemetry. Track how 新 (new) topics become 沸 (boiling), and toggle the state-pinned hotgovs block to watch algorithmic amplification.

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Pricing — pay per topic

Event	Cost
Actor start	$0.01
Per Weibo hot-search topic returned	$0.10

A 10-topic smoke test costs $1.01; a full 50-topic board pull costs $5.01. No subscription, no minimum commitment — pay only when you run.

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Data sources & reliability

1. Weibo public ajax endpoint (primary): weibo.com/ajax/side/hotSearch — the same endpoint Weibo's own site uses to render the hot-search widget. Returns the 50-entry realtime list plus 1-3 state-pinned hotgovs topics. Residential proxy recommended.
2. Direct-fetch fallback: if proxy negotiation fails, the actor retries via the runner's direct IP.
3. Best-effort translation: translate.googleapis.com (free, unauthenticated). Degrades gracefully — if rate-limited, keyword_english_translation is null and the rest of the record is still emitted.
4. Pinyin transliteration: bundled offline via pypinyin — deterministic, never rate-limits.

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How to run

Apify Console — paste your filter inputs, hit Run, download the dataset as JSON or CSV.

Apify API (Python):

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("nexgendata/weibo-hot-search-tracker").call(run_input={
    "limit": 50,
    "category": "all",
    "include_translation": True,
    "include_government_topics": True,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["rank"], item["keyword"], item["heat_score"])

Schedule it — pair the actor with an Apify scheduled task. Hourly (0 * * * *) gives 24 snapshots a day; every 5 minutes (*/5 * * * *) is typical for crisis monitoring during a sensitive product launch.

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FAQ

Does the Weibo hot search API require login? No — it reads a public JSON endpoint. A residential proxy is recommended for China rate limits.

How many topics does it return? Exactly 50 realtime topics, plus 1-3 optional state-pinned (hotgovs) entries.

Can I get English translations? Yes — best-effort English plus pinyin for every keyword. Disable translation for cheaper runs.

What do 新/热/沸 mean? New / hot / boiling status flags, exposed as is_new and is_hot.

How often does the list update? Roughly every minute on Weibo's side — schedule the actor to build your own time-series.

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Related actors — China social

• Bilibili Video Search — https://apify.com/nexgendata/bilibili-video-search
• RedNote (Xiaohongshu) Scraper — https://apify.com/nexgendata/rednote-scraper
• China Trends Tracker — https://apify.com/nexgendata/china-trends-tracker
• Kuaishou Trending Tracker — https://apify.com/nexgendata/kuaishou-trending-tracker
• Chinese Social Signals MCP — https://apify.com/nexgendata/chinese-social-signals-mcp

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