Douyin Trending & Hashtag Scraper: Topics + Videos

Scrape Douyin, the Chinese TikTok with roughly 750 million users, without a login, a browser, or an API key. Two modes: the live trending board, and every video under any hashtag.

What it returns

Trending mode pulls Douyin's own hot-search board: the topics trending right now, each with a hotness score and a label, plus the timestamp of the board itself. This is the same signal Chinese brands and agencies watch to decide what to publish that day. No input needed at all.

Hashtag mode takes one or more Douyin hashtags and returns the videos under each, paginated: description, duration, cover image URL, direct video URL and a canonical share link. It also returns a metadata record per hashtag with its total view count.

Input

• mode (required): trending or hashtag.
• hashtags: hashtag mode only. Douyin hashtag IDs, or full hashtag URLs such as https://www.douyin.com/hashtag/1575791821492238, from which the numeric ID is read automatically. Up to 10 hashtags per run.
• maxItems: caps records returned per hashtag, not per run. With 10 hashtags and the default of 50, a single run can deliver and bill for up to 500 records total, not 50.
• monitorMode: returns only records not delivered in an earlier run.

Example output

{
  "record_type": "video",
  "challenge_id": "1575791821492238",
  "aweme_id": "7657958714196815781",
  "description": "午夜深海巡航 #邮轮 #深海",
  "duration_ms": 18240,
  "cover_url": "https://p3-sign.douyinpic.com/...",
  "play_url": "https://aweme.snssdk.com/aweme/v1/playwm/?video_id=...",
  "share_url": "https://www.douyin.com/video/7657958714196815781",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-30T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Not available: author identity (nickname, handle) and engagement counts (likes, comments, shares) are not in this output. Douyin's unsigned video endpoint does not return them at all for this data source, not even as zero, so they are left out entirely rather than shipped as fields that always read null. Same reasoning applies to hashtag-mode "how many creators used this hashtag": Douyin's unsigned hashtag-info endpoint doesn't return that figure, so it isn't in the metadata record either. Total view count per hashtag IS returned.

What this does not do, and why

Douyin's keyword search, user profile feeds, single video lookup and music feeds all require a signed request (an a_bogus signature Douyin computes in browser JavaScript). Those endpoints return an empty stub without it. This actor covers only the endpoints that genuinely work without signing: the trending board, hashtag video feeds, and hashtag metadata. Ten endpoints were tested and exactly three returned real records; the other seven are deliberately not offered rather than shipped as fields that would never populate.

Douyin's ordinary web pages are also protected by a JavaScript challenge that returns an empty page body to any plain HTTP client, which is why this actor reads Douyin's public API rather than its web pages.

Turning it into a standing watch

Trending topics change hourly and hashtag feeds grow continuously, so this is most useful on a schedule. Set Monitor mode to true, save the run as an Apify Task, and add it to a Schedule. Every run after the first returns only what is new, so a daily trend watch bills for new topics rather than re-billing the same board every morning.

Requirements

This actor needs Apify's residential proxy. Douyin does not serve its API to datacenter IP addresses, and a run without residential proxy access will return nothing rather than partial data.

Who this is for

Brands and agencies tracking what is trending in the Chinese market before planning campaigns. Social listening and competitive research on a platform most Western tools do not cover at all. Anyone building a trend dashboard that needs Chinese social signal alongside Western platforms.

Pricing

Pay per record delivered, whether a trending topic, a hashtag metadata record or a video. A run that returns no data is never charged for data, though Apify's own small per-run platform start fee still applies regardless of yield.