Is there an API for WeChat article read counts and likes?

Before you pay a WeChat account for a placement, you want to see how its last 30 articles actually performed. The old ways to get reads and likes involve capturing your phone's traffic for a key and appmsg_token that expire within the hour. Here they come with the article list: Official Account article history returns 10 articles per call, and each one carries metrics.views (reads) and metrics.likes when they are available.

Where the numbers are, and where they aren't

Need	Endpoint	Field
Reads and likes per article	Article history	metrics.views, metrics.likes
Typical headline performance of an account	Account search with view=full	ext.avg_top_read, ext.avg_top_likes
Full text of one article	Article detail	no metrics; reads and likes are null here

There is no call that takes a single article link and returns only its reads. To get one article's numbers, page through its account's history until you reach it; for recent articles that is the first page or two.

Cost

Job	Calls	Cost
Last 30 articles of one account	3	$0.12
Last 100 articles of one account	10	$0.40
Last 30 articles of 20 shortlisted accounts	60	$2.40

Pull the numbers

curl -G "https://api.okdata.online/v1/wechat_mp/accounts/articles/list" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OKDATA_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "id=gh_363b924965e9" \
  --data-urlencode "view=full" \
  --data-urlencode "fields=title,published_at,metrics.views,metrics.likes,ext.position"

ext.position separates the headline (1) from secondary slots. Compare headlines with headlines: secondary slots get a fraction of the reads by design.

How to read them

• They are snapshots. Reads keep growing for days after publishing. Compare articles at a similar age, or note the fetch time next to each number.
• Not always there. If reads or likes can't be fetched for a page, they come back null and meta.unavailable names them. Count those as unknown, not zero.
• No 在看, shares or comment counts. Those fields are null for WeChat.
• Only public articles. Deleted articles are gone, along with their numbers.

Other routes

If the account is yours, the official data analytics API in WeChat's developer platform gives exact reads, shares and follower sources. That is the authoritative source and it is free. For accounts you don't own, asking the owner for a backend screenshot is standard practice before a paid placement, and it covers metrics no API sees. For a recurring view of several accounts, see competitor monitoring.