Weibo Scraper: Profile Stats & Post Timeline

China residential proxy. No login, no browser.

You are only charged for a profile or post that actually lands in your dataset. Blocked or empty lookups are never billed.

Overview

Weibo is China's dominant microblogging platform, the closest equivalent to Twitter/X in that market, and it is where Chinese brand mentions, celebrity news, breaking events and public sentiment actually surface first. This actor turns a Weibo user ID into structured rows: the account's public profile stats, and its recent post timeline with repost, comment and like counts on every post.

Give it one or more numeric Weibo user IDs (or full profile URLs that contain one) and it returns:

Profile info. Display name, follower and following counts, total post count, verification status and label, bio, avatar.

Post timeline. The account's recent posts, each with the post text, publish time, posting client, and its repost/comment/like counts, plus any attached images and whether it carries video or is itself a repost.

✅ Works from any numeric Weibo user ID · ✅ Full engagement stats on every post · ✅ No login, no API key · ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Why this needs a China proxy, and why it still isn't a browser

Weibo blocks non-China IPs at the connection level. A request from outside China does not even complete a TLS handshake with Weibo's servers, so no amount of clever headers ever gets through without a China proxy. That part is unavoidable and this actor is built around it by default.

What is not required is a browser. Weibo protects its API behind a "visitor" cookie system: a first-time visitor gets a 432 response until it presents a valid SUB cookie, and that cookie is issued by a plain two-step HTTP handshake Weibo's own web client calls before anything else. No JavaScript execution, no canvas fingerprint, nothing a Chromium instance is actually needed for. This actor performs that same two-step handshake as ordinary HTTP requests and then calls Weibo's own JSON API directly, which keeps it an order of magnitude cheaper than a Playwright-based scraper on the same target.

One thing this actor deliberately does not do: scrape Weibo search. Weibo's search page now redirects straight to an account sign-in wall even with a valid visitor session, which means real search access needs a logged-in account, and that is out of scope for a public data actor. Profile and timeline data, by contrast, is genuinely public and does not require a login.

Input

{
  "profileIds": ["1699432410"],
  "maxPostsPerProfile": 10,
  "includeProfileInfo": true
}

Field	What it takes
profileIds	Numeric Weibo user IDs, or full profile URLs that contain one (e.g. https://weibo.com/u/1699432410). Find it in the account's own profile URL. Up to 25 per run.
maxPostsPerProfile	How many recent posts to pull per account. Set to 0 to fetch profile info only, with no timeline.
includeProfileInfo	Whether to also push a profile-stats row for each account, on top of its posts.
proxyConfiguration	Defaults to China residential, which is required for this actor to reach Weibo at all. You can supply your own proxy group, but it must still resolve to a China exit node.

Output

Two record shapes land in the same dataset, distinguished by record_type.

Profile:

{
  "record_type": "profile-scraped",
  "uid": 1699432410,
  "screen_name": "example_news_account",
  "verified": true,
  "verified_reason": "Official media account",
  "followers_count": 94210335,
  "following_count": 452,
  "statuses_count": 203466,
  "bio": "Breaking news, as it happens.",
  "profile_url": "https://weibo.com/u/1699432410",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-14T09:12:03.000Z"
}

Post:

{
  "record_type": "post-scraped",
  "post_id": "5331585174080569",
  "text": "Breaking: fire department reports one rescuer injured in a factory fire...",
  "published_at": "2026-08-13T14:47:04.000Z",
  "source_client": "Weibo web",
  "reposts_count": 812,
  "comments_count": 340,
  "likes_count": 2110,
  "image_urls": "https://wx1.sinaimg.cn/....jpg",
  "has_video": false,
  "is_repost": false,
  "post_url": "https://m.weibo.cn/status/RdfFPh7xD",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-14T09:12:07.000Z"
}

Field	Description
👤 screen_name	Account display name
✅ verified / verified_reason	Official verification badge and its label text
👥 followers_count / following_count	Follower and following counts
📝 statuses_count	Total posts ever made by the account
💬 text	Post text, with all HTML markup stripped
📅 published_at	ISO publish timestamp
🔁 reposts_count	Repost count
💭 comments_count	Comment count
❤️ likes_count	Like (attitude) count
🖼️ image_urls	Attached images, comma-separated
🎥 has_video	Post carries a video attachment
🔄 is_repost	This post is itself a repost of another account's post

Common use cases

Brand and PR monitoring. Track how a brand or spokesperson account is performing on Weibo: follower growth, engagement rate per post, verification status changes.

Crisis and sentiment tracking. Pull an official account's timeline (news outlets, regulators, major brands) to see what is being said and how it is landing, in near real time.

Competitor and influencer research. Benchmark follower counts, posting cadence and engagement across a shortlist of accounts before a partnership decision.

Market research into Chinese public discourse. Weibo is frequently where a story breaks in China before it reaches any Western-facing source. This actor is a structured way to watch specific accounts for that.

AI agents. Feed structured Weibo account and post data into an agent tracking Chinese public sentiment on a brand, topic or event.

Pricing

Event	Price	You pay when
Profile scraped	$0.02	A profile's stats land in your dataset
Post scraped	$0.006	A post from a timeline lands in your dataset

Blocked or empty lookups cost nothing.

Run it on a schedule

1. Run once with the profiles you want tracked, then click Save as a task.
2. In the Apify Console go to Schedules → Create new.
3. Pick a frequency and attach the saved task.
4. Wire the dataset to Sheets, Slack or a webhook from the Integrations tab.

Deduplicate on post_id so a repeated schedule never reprocesses the same post.

FAQ

Do I need a Weibo account? No. Everything this actor returns is public profile and post data, reachable without logging in.

Can this scrape Weibo search results? Not currently. Weibo's search now requires an actual account login even for a visitor with a valid session cookie, which this actor deliberately does not attempt. Profile and timeline data does not have that restriction.

Why does it need a proxy when other actors in this catalog don't? Because Weibo blocks non-China traffic at the network level, before any request-level anti-bot logic even runs. It's a firewall rule, not a scraping problem. There is no plain-HTTP path around it, from any country.

How do I find a user's numeric ID? It's in their profile URL: weibo.com/u/<the number> or m.weibo.cn/u/<the number>.

Why did I get fewer posts than I asked for? Either the account has fewer public posts than your cap, or the timeline API stopped returning a next-page cursor. The run reports what it actually found.

Use from Claude, ChatGPT and any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/weibo-scraper

Or call it programmatically:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('themineworks/weibo-scraper').call({
  profileIds: ['1699432410'],
  maxPostsPerProfile: 10,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Questions, or need a field we don't return yet? Reach out through the Apify profile.