Toutiao Trending Scraper

Scrape the Toutiao hot board — the trending news list of 今日头条, China's biggest news aggregator — into clean JSON, CSV or Excel. This Toutiao scraper extracts rank, title, hot value, label (new/hot), category, thumbnail and link for every trending news topic. Fast and reliable.

Perfect for China news monitoring, PR and brand tracking, trend discovery and media research.

What does Toutiao Scraper do?

The Toutiao Scraper collects the live trending news hot board from Toutiao and returns it as structured data. It extracts every topic on the board with its rank, heat value, labels and category, so you can monitor what is trending in Chinese news and build a time series of topics.

What data can you scrape from Toutiao?

What you get

Each trending topic is returned as one clean record. Example output:

{
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "一组数据读懂我国能源转型新趋势",
  "hotValue": 12704620,
  "label": "new",
  "isNew": true,
  "isHot": false,
  "category": "society",
  "queryWord": "能源转型",
  "clusterId": "7668250705069",
  "image": "https://p3.toutiaoimg.com/...",
  "url": "https://www.toutiao.com/trending/7668",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.toutiao.com/hot-event/hot-board/",
  "collectedAt": "2026-07-30T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Output schema

Use cases

• China news monitoring — track what is trending across Chinese news in real time.
• PR and brand tracking — catch topics mentioning a brand, product or public figure.
• Trend discovery — spot rising stories early using rank and hot value.
• Media research — analyze categories and heat across time.
• Time-series building — schedule the actor to capture the board on an interval.
• Content planning — align editorial calendars with what audiences care about now.

How to scrape Toutiao data

1. Add the Toutiao Scraper to your Apify account.
2. Set the maximum number of trending topics to scrape.
3. Click Run.
4. Export the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull them via the Apify API.
5. Optionally schedule the actor (e.g. every 15–30 minutes) to build a time series.

Input

{
  "maxItems": 100
}

Tips

• The board is realtime — schedule the actor (e.g. every 15–30 min) to build a time series of China's trending news.
• hotValue is Toutiao's heat metric; higher means hotter.

Need more Chinese content data?

• Douban Scraper
• Weibo Scraper
• V2EX Scraper
• Bilibili Scraper

FAQ

How many topics can I scrape? As many as the board carries — set maxItems to cap the run.

Do I need any setup or a login? No setup and no login. Just add the actor and run.

How fresh is the data? The hot board is realtime, so each run reflects what is trending at that moment.

What export formats are supported? JSON, CSV, Excel and XML, plus programmatic access through the Apify API.

How does billing work? You pay only per item you get, so costs scale with the number of topics you scrape.

Is the data only public data? Yes — the scraper returns only publicly available trending-topic information.

Can I integrate this with other tools? The Toutiao Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Notes

Original clean-room implementation. Returns only public data; you are responsible for compliance with Toutiao's terms. Not affiliated with Toutiao or ByteDance.

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.