Weibo Scraper — Hot Search, Posts, Comments & Creator Feeds
Pricing
from $35.00 / 1,000 item scrapeds
Scrape Weibo (微博), China's biggest Chinese social media platform: the hot-search board (热搜), keyword search, creator timelines, post comments and the hot timeline — six modes in one Actor. Social listening, china market research and user generated content at the source.
What to scrape from Weibo
Search query in Chinese or English. Chinese keywords yield better results. Examples: 人工智能, 新能源汽车, iPhone
When on, a Latin brand name (e.g. 'Nike') also searches its Chinese name ('耐克') and results are merged — so you get full native recall even when searching in English. Capped at maxResults (no extra cost). Add your own variants via Search aliases below.
Extra term variants to also search and merge with your query — e.g. add '耐克' for Nike, or alternate spellings. Useful for brands not in the built-in dictionary.
Weibo user IDs (numeric) or profile URLs. NOTE (measured 2026-08-28): Weibo now serves user timelines only to logged-in sessions — anonymous requests get an empty timeline from both datacenter and residential IPs. For user_posts, add your cookieString below (log in at weibo.com, F12 > Network, copy the Cookie header). The prefill shows the ID format. All other modes work with no login.
Weibo post IDs or detail URLs. Example: 5125463789012345 or https://m.weibo.cn/detail/5125463789012345
Maximum results to return (applies per user in user_posts mode). Typical patterns: 20-50 for a quick lookup, 100-300 for daily brand / sentiment monitoring, 500 for a full keyword sweep or AI-training pull. Higher values automatically walk more result pages. See the Pricing tab for per-result cost.
In search, user posts and hot timeline modes, also pull the comment thread of every post found and return each comment as its own row (tagged mode: post_comment, linked by postId). Comments are where the opinion is — the post is the prompt, the replies are the sentiment. No login or cookie required. Best paired with hot timeline: measured 2026-08-05, 5 trending posts returned 89 rows with maxComments 20 and 114 with 50 (~18-23x), because those posts actually carry threads — a broad keyword search mostly returns posts with no replies. Posts with no thread are skipped automatically, so you are never billed for an empty round-trip. Tip for volume: a narrow, high-engagement query returns far bigger threads than a broad one — a generic keyword mostly returns posts with zero comments. This multiplies rows and cost — 100 posts × 50 comments is ~5,100 rows instead of 100 — so cap it with Max comments per post. Works with deltaMode: a scheduled run then bills only genuinely new replies. Off by default.
Adds one extra row per Chinese province, computed from the location Weibo already attaches to each post (发布于 广东). Each rollup row carries province, provinceEn, postCount, sharePct, promotedCount and, when sentiment is on, sentimentMean — so you can see whether a story is national or contained to one province, and which regions are driving it. No extra requests and no extra scraping time: it is computed from data the run already fetched. Rollup rows bill as ordinary results. Honest sampling: if fewer than 50 posts in the run carry a location, no province rows are emitted and none are charged; between 50 and 200 they ship with lowConfidence: true. Every row states its own sampleSize. Works with search, hot timeline and user posts. Off by default.
Weibo mixes paid promotion into keyword results, and those posts used to arrive indistinguishable from public opinion. Every row now carries isPromoted, and this decides what to do with it. organic_only excludes promoted posts, so a brand or sentiment study is not diluted by advertising — and because the filter runs before billing, you are not charged for the rows it removes, which means your bill goes down. promo_only flips it into a China paid-social monitor: which advertisers are buying against your keyword. all is the default and changes nothing. Note on counts: filtering happens after fetching, so asking for 100 posts with organic_only returns fewer than 100 — raise maxResults if you need a fixed number back. The promoted share varies a lot by query and hour (measured 0 of 53 on one search, 1 of 10 on one hot timeline), so no fixed percentage is claimed.
Maximum comments to fetch per post (post_comments mode)
Tag each post/comment with lexicon-based Chinese sentiment — polarity + a -1.0…+1.0 score. Optional add-on — for Chinese text it loads a model, so enable with run memory set to 512 MB or more.
Turn a one-off search or user-posts pull into a recurring monitor: when on, each run returns only posts not seen in previous runs (deduped by post ID across runs, per Delta state key). Pair it with an Apify Schedule for a hands-off daily/weekly feed — you pay only for genuinely new posts. (Hot Search Delta mode has its own built-in delta and ignores this toggle.) Know the trade before you switch it on: a full run returns the whole current result set and bills for it; a delta run returns only what has appeared since the last run. On fast-moving boards (trending, hot search, popular) that is still a healthy batch every run. On a narrow keyword or a single creator it can be a handful of rows, or none on a quiet day — which is the feature working, not a broken run. Pick delta when you want to be told what is NEW; leave it off when you want the data itself.
Names an independent tracking stream for the delta features (Delta mode in search/user_posts, and Hot Search Delta). Keep the default for a single scheduled monitor; use distinct keys (e.g. 'nike-weekly', 'hourly') to run several independent delta streams without collision. State persists across runs, so each scheduled run reports only what's new since the previous one.
