Weibo Scraper: Profile Stats & Post Timeline · From $2.25/1k

What does Weibo Scraper do?

It turns a Weibo user ID into structured data: the account's public profile stats, and its recent post timeline with repost, comment and like counts on every post. 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 and public sentiment surface first. Give it a numeric Weibo user ID, or a profile URL that contains one, and you get clean JSON rows for that account's profile and timeline.

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

Post timeline: post text with HTML stripped, publish time, posting client, repost, comment and like counts, attached images, and whether the post carries video or is itself a repost.

✅ Works from any numeric Weibo user ID | ✅ Full engagement stats on every post | ✅ No account credentials used | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Who is it for?

Brand and PR teams monitoring an official account's follower growth and engagement rate. Crisis and sentiment researchers watching what a news outlet, regulator or brand account is posting in near real time. Competitive and influencer researchers benchmarking follower counts and posting cadence before a partnership decision. AI agents tracking Chinese public sentiment on a brand, topic or event.

How much does it cost to scrape Weibo?

You pay per profile and per post actually delivered. Nothing else, and there is no separate start fee.

Apify plan	Price per 1,000 results
Free	$3.00
Bronze	$2.75
Silver	$2.50
Gold and above	$2.25

A "result" is either a profile-stats row or a single post, both events are priced the same on your plan. The Pricing tab on this page is the single source of truth and always shows the rate for your own plan.

What a real job costs. Apify's Free plan includes $5 of usage credit every month. At the Free-plan rate that is roughly 1,666 results a month at no cost to you. Tracking 25 accounts with 50 posts each pulls 1,275 rows in one run, 25 profiles plus 1,250 posts, which costs about $3.83 on Free or about $2.87 on Gold.

What is never charged. A blocked profile, a profile that does not exist, and an empty timeline page cost nothing. The profile and post events fire only once a record is actually in your dataset.

What input does it take?

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

Input	What it does
profileIds	Numeric Weibo user IDs, or full profile URLs that contain one, for example https://weibo.com/u/1699432410. 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 this actor requires to reach Weibo at all.

How do I pull profile stats and posts for one account?

{
  "profileIds": ["1699432410"],
  "maxPostsPerProfile": 50,
  "includeProfileInfo": true
}

How do I watch several accounts at once?

Pass up to 25 IDs in one run. Each account is fetched with its own session, so one account being blocked does not stop the others.

{
  "profileIds": ["1699432410", "1195242865", "1618051664"],
  "maxPostsPerProfile": 20,
  "includeProfileInfo": true
}

Does this actor log in to a Weibo account?

No. It never enters a username, a password, or any saved account credentials, and it never touches a real Weibo account.

What it does do, before every profile lookup, is complete Weibo's own Sina Visitor System handshake, the two plain HTTP calls (genvisitor then incarnate) that Weibo's own web client runs for any first-time, logged-out visitor before it will answer API requests. That handshake mints an anonymous SUB/SUBP visitor cookie pair scoped to the session. It is not a JavaScript or canvas fingerprint challenge, and it is not the mechanism behind an actual Weibo login, it is the same anonymous cookie exchange that happens automatically in the background the first time anyone's browser opens weibo.cn without being signed in. This actor performs those same two calls as ordinary HTTP requests, with no browser involved.

Weibo's own search surface and home feed are different: those genuinely redirect to a real account sign-in wall (passport.weibo.com/sso/signin) even with a valid visitor cookie, which is a real login requirement. This actor deliberately does not attempt that surface. It is scoped to what is reachable with the anonymous visitor cookie alone, which is a user's public profile and post timeline by numeric user ID.

Why does this actor need a China proxy, if it isn't logging in?

Weibo blocks non-China IP addresses at the connection level. A plain request from a non-China datacenter does not complete a TLS handshake with m.weibo.cn at all, it times out before Weibo's application layer, visitor cookie or otherwise, is ever reached. That is a network-level firewall rule, not a bot check, and there is no plain-HTTP path around it from outside China. This actor defaults to Apify's China residential proxy for that reason, and it is the only proxy tier this actor uses, there is no cheaper tier to fall back to because none of them reach Weibo's servers at all.

Because this is a paid, per-request proxy tier, the actor also carries a run-level spend ceiling and stops a profile early if several consecutive timeline pages come back empty, so a blocked or exhausted account cannot run up proxy cost with nothing to show for it.

What data do you get back?

Two record shapes land in the same dataset, distinguished by record_type. A profile row and two posts from the same account's timeline:

[
  {
    "record_type": "profile-scraped",
    "uid": 1699432410,
    "screen_name": "央视新闻",
    "gender": "female",
    "verified": true,
    "verified_reason": "央视新闻官方账号",
    "followers_count": 94210335,
    "following_count": 452,
    "statuses_count": 203466,
    "bio": "第一时间，报道天下",
    "avatar_url": "https://tvax1.sinaimg.cn/crop.0.0.512.512.180/abc123def.jpg",
    "profile_url": "https://weibo.com/u/1699432410",
    "scraped_at": "2026-09-10T09:12:03.000Z"
  },
  {
    "record_type": "post-scraped",
    "post_id": "5331585174080569",
    "text": "突发：某工厂发生火灾，一名消防员在救援中受伤，目前已送医治疗，伤情稳定。",
    "published_at": "2026-09-09T14:47:04.000Z",
    "source_client": "微博 weibo.com",
    "reposts_count": 812,
    "comments_count": 340,
    "likes_count": 2110,
    "image_urls": "https://wx1.sinaimg.cn/large/006abc1defghijklmn.jpg",
    "has_video": false,
    "is_repost": false,
    "post_url": "https://m.weibo.cn/status/RdfFPh7xD",
    "scraped_at": "2026-09-10T09:12:07.000Z"
  },
  {
    "record_type": "post-scraped",
    "post_id": "5331601882736104",
    "text": "转发：现场画面曝光，多名网友表示已第一时间报警。",
    "published_at": "2026-09-09T16:02:11.000Z",
    "source_client": "HUAWEI Mate 60 Pro",
    "reposts_count": 96,
    "comments_count": 44,
    "likes_count": 573,
    "image_urls": null,
    "has_video": true,
    "is_repost": true,
    "post_url": "https://m.weibo.cn/status/RdgK3n2pQ",
    "scraped_at": "2026-09-10T09:12:09.000Z"
  }
]

Field	Description
🆔 record_type	profile-scraped or post-scraped, so both shapes can share one dataset
👤 screen_name	Account display name
⚧ gender	female, male, or Weibo's own code if neither
✅ 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
💬 bio	Account bio text
🖼️ avatar_url	Profile photo URL
🔗 profile_url	Canonical weibo.com/u/<uid> link
📰 text	Post text, with all HTML markup stripped
📅 published_at	ISO publish timestamp
📱 source_client	The app or client the post was made from
🔁 reposts_count, comments_count, likes_count	Engagement counts on the post
🖼️ image_urls	Attached image URLs, comma-separated, null if none
🎥 has_video	Post carries a video attachment
🔄 is_repost	This post is itself a repost of another account's post
🔗 post_url	Direct link to the post
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp when the record was captured

What are the limitations?

Worth knowing before you buy, so there are no surprises:

• No search and no home feed. Weibo's search and logged-out home feed redirect to a real account sign-in wall even with a valid visitor session, so this actor is scoped to a specific account's profile and timeline by user ID, not keyword search across Weibo.
• A China residential proxy is required, not optional. Non-China traffic is blocked at the connection level before any request even reaches Weibo, so there is no cheaper fallback tier.
• Up to 25 profiles per run, up to 500 posts per profile. A larger watchlist needs more than one run.
• A blocked or fully exhausted account stops early. The actor's own spend ceiling and empty-page guard end a profile that is not yielding results rather than continuing to pay for a proxy session that is not working, so a stubborn account may return fewer posts than requested.
• image_urls and a handful of other fields are only present when Weibo's own response carries them. A post with no images or an account with no bio simply omits that key rather than sending an empty string.

What can you use it for?

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.

How do I get started?

1. Find the numeric user ID in the account's own profile URL, weibo.com/u/<the number>.
2. Open the actor and enter it under profileIds.
3. Set maxPostsPerProfile to control how much timeline you pull, or 0 for profile stats only.
4. Click Start.
5. Download as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull the dataset via API or MCP.

Can I run it on a schedule?

Yes, with Apify's built-in Schedules. No code, no cron server of your own.

1. Run the actor once with the profiles you want tracked, then click Save as a task.
2. In the Apify Console, go to Schedules, then Create new, name it, and pick a frequency: a preset (hourly, daily, weekly) or a cron expression such as 0 6 * * * for daily at 6am.
3. Under Actors or tasks to run, add the task you saved in step 1, then save.
4. Deduplicate on post_id downstream so a repeated schedule never double-counts the same post, since this actor's timeline pull is not incremental the way a monitor-mode actor is.

Nothing is charged just for the schedule existing.

Is scraping Weibo profile and post data legal?

This actor reads only a Weibo account's public profile and post timeline, the same pages any logged-out visitor's browser can load. It never authenticates with a real account and never accesses anything behind Weibo's actual sign-in wall.

This is general information, not legal advice. Post text, images and profile details can include personal data, so GDPR, CCPA and China's own Personal Information Protection Law apply to how you use it. You remain responsible for having a lawful basis for processing what this actor returns, particularly for anything beyond aggregate brand or sentiment monitoring.

FAQ

Do I need a Weibo account? No. This actor never signs in to an account and never enters credentials. It does complete Weibo's own anonymous visitor-cookie handshake before each lookup, the same exchange any logged-out browser triggers automatically, but that is not an account login.

Can this scrape Weibo search results? No. Weibo's search redirects to a real account sign-in wall even with a valid visitor session, and this actor deliberately does not attempt that. Profile and timeline data by user ID 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 check even runs. It is a firewall rule, not a scraping problem, so there is no plain-HTTP path around it from any country.

How do I find a user's numeric ID? It is 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, the timeline API stopped returning a next-page cursor, or the run's own spend guard ended an account that stopped yielding new posts. The run summary reports what actually happened.

Can I use Weibo Scraper through an MCP server? Yes. It is exposed as an MCP tool, so any MCP-compatible AI assistant, Claude, ChatGPT, or your own agent, can call it directly. See the section below for the paste-ready prompt and setup.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT and any MCP agent

Add it to Claude Code in one line:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=themineworks/weibo-scraper"

Or point any MCP client at:

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

Copy this into your AI assistant

Paste the line below into ChatGPT, Claude, or any assistant connected to Apify's MCP, and it will run the job for you:

Use the Apify actor themineworks/weibo-scraper to pull the profile stats and the last 20 posts for Weibo user ID 1699432410, and summarise the account's follower count and average engagement per post.

Or call it programmatically with the Apify client:

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,
  includeProfileInfo: true,
});

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

Related actors

Chinese platforms are mostly unclaimed ground in English-language scraper communities, where the discussion rarely gets past Twitter/X and Instagram. Pair this with:

• Bilibili Scraper: video search and creator stats from China's dominant video platform.
• Xiaohongshu Explore Scraper: lifestyle and product discovery feeds from Xiaohongshu (RED).

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the actor's Apify Console page.