How can I find out how many followers a WeChat Official Account has?

A media buyer is quoted a price for a placement on an account that says it has 300,000 followers. There is no page in WeChat where you can check that: the follower count lives in the account's own backend and nobody else can see it. What you can check is how the account performs in public. Official Account search returns, for each matching account, an estimated follower count and, with view=full, the average reads and likes of its headline articles and how many articles it publishes a week.

What you get, and how much to trust it

Field	What it is	How to use it
followers	Estimate from a third-party database, not WeChat's number; ext.followers_note says so	Size band only: 10k, 100k, 1M
ext.avg_top_read	Average reads of recent headline articles	The best public signal of reach
ext.avg_top_likes	Average likes of those headlines	Engagement, compared with reads
ext.articles_per_week	Publishing rate	Is the account active?
ext.last_published_at	Last publish time	Has it gone quiet?
ext.owner	The registered owner, when listed	Who you are really dealing with

Headline reads are what an advertiser buys, so they matter more than the follower figure. An account that claims 300,000 followers and averages 2,000 headline reads has either inflated its count or lost its audience.

Check one account

curl -G "https://api.okdata.online/v1/wechat_mp/accounts/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OKDATA_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "query=the exact account name" \
  --data-urlencode "view=full" \
  --data-urlencode "fields=id,name,followers,ext.avg_top_read,ext.avg_top_likes,ext.articles_per_week,ext.owner"

Cost

Search is charged per account returned: $0.058 each, at most $0.58 per call. An exact name usually returns one or two accounts. To verify the averages against real articles, one article history call adds the last 10 articles with their reads, for $0.04.

Check	Calls	Cost, at most
1 account, estimate and averages	1 search	$0.58
Same, plus last 30 articles' reads	1 search + 3 history	{{cost:wechat_mp.accounts.search1+wechat_mp.accounts.articles.list3}}

Caveats

• The estimate is approximate and can be null when there is no figure for an account. Never quote it to a client as the real number.
• Bio, verification and post count are not part of the search result; those fields are null and meta.unavailable lists them.
• Some accounts publish rarely but get high reads per piece. Look at reads per article, not volume.

Better sources when you can get them

The account owner can export the real follower count and its trend from the backend; asking for a screenshot before a deal is normal and free. WeChat's official advertising marketplace for Official Account placements shows backend-verified data for the accounts listed there. Ranking platforms like 新榜 publish their own estimates across many accounts. Use the API for a fast first pass over a long list; see creator discovery.