Does Weibo still have an open API for reading posts in 2026?

Weibo's developer site, open.weibo.com, is still online and still documents an API. What it lets an ordinary app read is narrow. We read the relevant pages on 12 November 2026; this is what they say, and what they leave open.

What the free API reads

The API index, last updated 9 May 2025, lists OAuth login, two user endpoints (users/show, users/domain_show), a handful of post reads (statuses/home_timeline, statuses/user_timeline, statuses/repost_timeline, statuses/mentions, statuses/show, statuses/count), comment reads and a share endpoint. No search endpoint appears in it. The pages for the timeline endpoints spell out the limits:

Endpoint	What its page says
statuses/user_timeline	After an upgrade, uid and screen_name can only be the currently authorized user; at most the latest 5 posts are returned (10 through the official mobile SDK)
statuses/home_timeline	Only posts by users who have authorized your app are returned; others are dropped
search/topics	An "advanced" endpoint that needs approval, searches only inside a #topic#, returns at most the latest 200 results; its page dates from 2012 and the current index no longer links it

In short, the free API is built for apps that act on behalf of their own logged-in users. It does not read a stranger's timeline or search all of Weibo.

The commercial data API

Search lives in the commercial data API (商业数据API). Its overview, updated 8 May 2025, describes it as a channel for companies doing analytics, public-opinion monitoring and operations, partly paid, offered as REST calls and as a push subscription by keyword or user, with an email contact for access. The Business API list, updated 18 September 2026, marks search/statuses/limited (posts containing a keyword), historical search tasks and statuses/user_timeline/other (another user's posts) as paid.

What we could not verify: the prices, the approval criteria, how long approval takes, and whether search/topics is still granted to new apps. None of that is published on the pages above, and we did not apply.

Choosing a route

Need	Route	Cost
Your own account's posts and comments	Free official API with OAuth	free, rate-limited
Keyword search at contract scale, with Weibo's agreement	Commercial data API	not published
Public posts by keyword, now, no application	Weibo post search	$0.002 a page of about 10
A public account's followers and verification	Weibo account profile	$0.002

Example

curl -G "https://api.okdata.online/v1/weibo/posts/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OKDATA_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode 'query=新品发布' \
  --data-urlencode 'sort=latest' \
  --data-urlencode 'fields=id,url,text,published_at,author.id,author.name,metrics'

Then look up any author by the numeric author.id with account profile. Ten pages of results and 50 author profiles cost $0.12.

Limits

• okdata reads public posts and profiles only. It cannot post, read private content or act for a user; that is what the official OAuth API is for.
• There is no endpoint here for one account's timeline or for a post's comments, both of which the commercial API offers.
• Search covers what Weibo serves for a keyword; see searching Weibo without a login cookie for what that means in practice, and official versus third-party APIs for the general trade-off.