🧵 Threads Search Scraper

Search Threads (threads.com) by any keyword, topic, hashtag, or phrase — in bulk — and export every matching public post as clean, structured data. Get captions, media URLs, full engagement metrics, author info, link previews, and timestamps in one run. Perfect for trend analysis, brand monitoring, competitor research, and social listening.

✨ Why Choose This Actor?

• 🔍 Bulk search — pass a whole list of queries; each is scraped in turn.
• 🧠 Self-healing — the persisted-query token (doc_id) is scraped live from the Threads bundles, validated with a probe request before the run starts, and cached between runs. Meta rotates it regularly; a stale token would otherwise return zero rows on every request.
• 🛡️ Smart proxy ladder — starts direct, auto-falls back to datacenter → residential only when needed, then sticks. No wasted proxy spend.
• 🧯 Never dies mid-run — blocks, GraphQL errors, expired sessions and bad input are contained; the run finishes with whatever it collected instead of failing.
• 📊 4 ready-made dataset views — Overview, Engagement, Media, and Users — each rendered as its own table.
• 💾 Live saving — every post is pushed the instant it's parsed, so a partial run still gives you data.
• 🧩 Resume anywhere — use the nextCursor from a previous run to continue exactly where you stopped.

🔑 Key Features

Feature	Description
🔎 Keyword / hashtag / phrase search	Search anything you'd type into Threads search
📊 Sort modes	top (most relevant) or recent (newest first)
👤 Username filter	Keep only posts from a specific author
📅 Date range filter	before / after date filtering
🎬 Rich media	Image + video URLs, all candidate sizes, link previews
📈 Full engagement	Likes, replies, reposts, quotes, reshares

📥 Input

{
  "searchQueries": ["AI", "#technology"],
  "sort": "top",
  "from": "",
  "before": "",
  "after": "",
  "maxPosts": 50,
  "cursor": "",
  "sessionId": "YOUR_THREADS_SESSIONID_COOKIE",
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Field	Type	Description
searchQueries	array	Required. One or more keywords/hashtags/phrases.
sort	string	top or recent. Default top.
from	string	Only keep posts from this username.
before / after	string (date)	Date-range filter (client-side).
maxPosts	integer	Max posts per query (1–1000). Reached exactly when a valid sessionId is supplied; without one Threads caps the result set (see note below). Ignored if cursor is set.
cursor	string	Resume token (nextCursor) from a previous run; fetches one page.
sessionId	string	Logged-in sessionid cookie. Required for more than ~30 posts per query. If the account running the Actor sets a THREADS_SESSIONID environment variable, that is used as a fallback.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify proxy settings. Defaults to no proxy with auto-fallback.

ℹ️ Why a session ID? Logged out, Threads' search connection returns one page and no cursor at all — page_info.end_cursor is null, has_next_page is false, and every edge cursor is an empty string. That is roughly 20 posts on top and ~11–16 on recent, and it is a server-side limit: first: 100, proxies, countries and alternate search surfaces all return the same single page. To squeeze out more without a session the Actor automatically tops your results up from the other sort order (same query, different ranking), which yields ~30–40 unique posts per query. Anything beyond that needs a valid logged-in sessionid, which makes the connection paginate and return a real cursor. An expired session is detected and dropped automatically — the run continues logged-out instead of returning nothing.

📤 Output

Each post is one dataset record:

{
  "postId": "3841407839143315258",
  "postCode": "DVPbBO5icc6",
  "postUrl": "https://www.threads.com/@claudeai/post/DVPbBO5icc6",
  "userId": "63442222226",
  "username": "claudeai",
  "isVerified": true,
  "captionText": "A statement from Anthropic CEO…",
  "mediaType": 8,
  "imageUrl": "https://…",
  "allImages": ["https://…"],
  "allVideos": [],
  "likeCount": 6165,
  "directReplyCount": 459,
  "repostCount": 860,
  "quoteCount": 244,
  "reshareCount": 566,
  "takenAtISO": "2026-02-27T00:18:41.000Z",
  "takenAtFormatted": "2/27/2026, 12:18:41 AM",
  "linkPreviewUrl": "",
  "searchQuery": "AI",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://…",
  "nextCursor": "3221f23051b846b1a8cd5eeff599d442:1"
}

Fields that can legitimately be empty: imageUrl / thumbnailUrl / allImages are blank only for text-only posts (mediaType: 19); videoUrl / allVideos only for posts without video; linkPreview* only for posts without a link card; replyToUsername / replyToUserId only for posts that are not replies; nextCursor is empty whenever Threads does not hand out a cursor (i.e. every logged-out run).

The dataset ships with 4 views (tabs in the Output table): 📋 Overview, 📊 Engagement, 🎬 Media, 👥 Users.

🚀 How to Use (Apify Console)

1. Log in at console.apify.com → Actors.
2. Open Threads Search Scraper.
3. Add your search queries, set maxPosts, and paste a sessionId for deep pagination.
4. Click Start.
5. Watch the live log as posts stream in.
6. Open the Output tab and export to JSON / CSV / XLSX.

🤖 Use via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<actor-id>/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"searchQueries":["AI"],"maxPosts":20,"sessionId":"…"}'

🎯 Best Use Cases

• 📈 Track trending topics & hashtags
• 🏷️ Monitor brand and product mentions
• 🔬 Research competitors and their engagement
• 👂 Social listening & sentiment sourcing

💵 Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event: you're charged per post successfully scraped (post-scraped). You only pay for data you actually receive.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a session ID? Only for more than ~30–40 posts per query. Without one, Threads itself serves a single page of search results and the Actor collects everything that page (plus the complementary sort order) contains.

Can I scrape several queries at once? Yes — that's what searchQueries is for. Each query respects maxPosts independently.

Is private content scraped? No. Only publicly available search results are collected.

⚖️ Legal

Data is collected only from publicly available sources. You are responsible for compliance with Threads' Terms of Service and applicable laws (GDPR, CCPA, etc.).

🛟 Support & Feedback

Found a bug or want a feature? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab — we read every one.