Is there an API for the Douyin hot search list?

A newsroom wants a Slack message whenever a topic about their beat climbs into Douyin's top 10. A brand team wants a morning digest of the board with anything relevant to the category flagged. Both need the board as data on a schedule, and scraping the app's hot list page means signatures, device parameters and a browser. One API call returns the whole board as JSON.

The endpoint

Douyin hot search board takes no parameters. One call returns the current main hot search list, about 50 rows, each with:

• rank, the position on the board;
• name, the hot word as Douyin shows it;
• heat, Douyin's hot value;
• url, a douyin.com search link for that word.

What polling costs

Frequency	Calls per day	Per day	Per 30 days
Every hour	24	$0.048	$1.44
Every 15 minutes	96	$0.192	$5.76
Hourly, plus 1 search page for 3 new topics a day	27	{{cost:douyin.trends.list24+douyin.videos.search3}}	—

Example

curl -s "https://api.okdata.online/v1/douyin/trends/list" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OKDATA_API_KEY" \
  | jq -r '.data.items[:10][] | "\(.rank). \(.name)  \(.heat)"'

To see the videos behind a hot word, pass name to video search with sort=most_liked.

Things to know

• This is the main hot search board. Douyin's other boards (entertainment, society, challenges, music) are not in the catalog.
• The first row can be a pinned topic Douyin places at the top; it may have no heat value, so heat is null. Rank follows the board's order.
• There is no history in the response. Store each snapshot with meta.fetched_at to build one.
• Rate limits apply per key; the X-RateLimit-Remaining header tells your poller how much burst is left before it should wait.

Alternatives

The hot list in the Douyin app is free for a person to look at. Hot-list aggregator sites show several Chinese boards side by side and suit casual monitoring. 抖音热点宝 in the creator tools adds analysis for creators. For alerts and archives in your own systems, the API is simpler. Weibo's board is also available if you watch both (Weibo hot search); see trend research for a combined setup.