How do I get the videos for a TikTok hashtag through an API?

A café chain launched #matchamonday and wants to see what people posted with it: who joined, which videos got liked, what they said in the captions. On TikTok you open the hashtag page and scroll. Through an API you cannot fetch that page directly, at least not here. What you can do is search for the tag and filter. For most campaign checks that gets you the videos that matter, the ones TikTok ranks highest.

How to do it

1. Search the tag text with TikTok video search, as plain words: matchamonday or matcha monday.
2. Each video comes back with a hashtags list. Keep only the videos whose list contains the tag, compared in lowercase.
3. Page with page.next_cursor until you stop finding new matches.
4. Use sort=most_liked to see the top of the tag first.

import os, requests

URL = "https://api.okdata.online/v1/tiktok/videos/search"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['OKDATA_API_KEY']}"}
TAG = "matchamonday"

found, cursor = {}, None
for _ in range(10):  # at most 10 pages, about 300 videos
    params = {"query": TAG, "sort": "most_liked", **({"cursor": cursor} if cursor else {})}
    body = requests.get(URL, headers=H, params=params, timeout=60).json()
    if body["code"] != "ok":
        raise RuntimeError(f"{body['code']}: {body['message']}")
    for v in body["data"]["items"]:
        if TAG in [h.lower() for h in (v["hashtags"] or [])]:
            found[v["id"]] = (v["author"]["username"], v["metrics"]["likes"], v["url"])
    if not body["page"]["has_more"]:
        break
    cursor = body["page"]["next_cursor"]

print(len(found), "videos carry", "#" + TAG)

Cost

Depth	Calls	Cost
First page	1	$0.002
About 300 videos	10	$0.02
1,000 videos	34	$0.068

You pay for every page you fetch, including the videos the filter throws away. A distinctive tag wastes little; a generic one like #fyp wastes most of each page.

Where this falls short

• You get what search returns for the words, ranked by relevance or likes. That overlaps with the hashtag page but is not the same list, and it is not every video ever tagged.
• The tag's total view count shown on its TikTok page is not returned.
• There is no date filter; sort on published_at to see the newest posts.
• For a big, long-running tag, you will see the head of it, not the long tail.

When to use something else

• TikTok's Research API can query by hashtag name with a date range, and it is free for approved non-profit academic researchers.
• TikTok Creative Center shows which hashtags are trending by region for advertisers, without code.
• TikTokApi's hashtag feature exists, though its issue tracker is full of reports that it stops returning results.

For tracking what rises and falls over weeks, see trend research.