How to Scrape TikTok Trending Content? Efficient Trend Data Collection with Proxy Pools

Within the TikTok ecosystem, trending data not only reflects the most popular content, products, and trends, but also often determines the direction of the next traffic surge. Whether it’s product selection, content editing, or data analysis, whoever masters this data first is more likely to gain a competitive advantage.

However, efficiently and stably collecting this trending information is not as simple as it seems. With the continuous upgrading of platform anti-scraping mechanisms—including frequent IP blocking, sliding CAPTCHA verification, and dynamic data loading—traditional web scraping methods are no longer applicable.

This article will provide an in-depth analysis of how to achieve stable data collection from the TikTok trending list by constructing a reasonable proxy pool and combining it with dynamic residential proxy technology.

Using Proxy IPs to Crawl TikTok Trending Topics

TikTok has one of the strictest anti-scraping systems among current social media platforms, mainly reflected in:

• Frequency limit: If the same IP makes too many requests, it may be temporarily blocked or even permanently blacklisted within a short period of time.
• IP Blacklist: Some cloud service IP ranges (such as data center proxies) have been marked by the platform as sources of non-organic traffic.
• Swipe verification and behavior detection: The system will detect user interaction behavior, and requests lacking JS execution and swipe trajectory will be judged as automated access.

In scenarios where high-frequency requests coexist with strict restrictions, request methods using a single IP or fixed exit point are unlikely to maintain a stable connection to the TikTok API, especially when performing batch scraping, which is more likely to trigger blocking mechanisms.

The platform has high requirements for the source of access, and it is difficult for ordinary networks to obtain data stably over a long period of time. Therefore, most web crawlers use dynamic residential proxy IPs to simulate the access environment of real users and improve the success rate.

TikTok Trending List Crawler Practical Guide

The basic process is as follows:

1. Analyze the structure of the trending topics page to find the JSON data source (usually an XHR request)

Open your browser and go to https://www.tiktok.com/discover . Press F12 to open the developer tools, switch to the “Network” panel, and refresh the page.

XHR requests are triggered during page loading . APIs with keywords like “discover ” or “item_list” generally return JSON content containing key fields such as video title, link, and number of likes.

the complete URL and request headers of the request , which can then be used to simulate requests in the code.

2. Set request headers to simulate browser access

headers such as User-Agent , Accept , and Referer that are consistent with those of your browser .

You can use Chrome extensions such as “ModHeader” or browser tools to view the header content. Example:

headers = {

"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36...",

"Accept": "application/json, text/plain, */*",

"Referer": "https://www.tiktok.com/",

"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",

}

It is recommended to add additional cookie information to simulate login status (if the target interface requires authorized access).

3. Integrate with kookeey Dynamic Residential Proxy to Achieve IP Rotation

Access method:

All crawler requests are routed through a proxy.

Automatically rotate IPs based on request volume to reduce 403/429 risk.

When you need to collect trending topics from different countries, simply switch to the corresponding region’s export option.

Below is a sample code for a very simple proxy integration :

import requests, random

# kookeey Dynamic Residential Proxy Example (can be replaced with gateway/IP pool format)

proxies_list = [

{"http": "http://user:pass@proxy1.kookeey.com:12345"},

{"http": "http://user:pass@proxy2.kookeey.com:12345"},

]

headers = {

"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0",

"Referer": "https://www.tiktok.com/",

}

url = "https://www.tiktok.com/discover"

# Randomly select a residential agent to implement rotation.

resp = requests.get(url, headers=headers, proxies=random.choice(proxies_list))

print(resp.status_code)

If you are using the kookeey dynamic gateway mode , you don’t need to maintain a proxy pool at all. IP rotation is handled automatically by the gateway, making it more stable.

4. Acquire data and parse and process it

In real-world projects, you can also use headless browser tools like Selenium or Playwright to handle JS rendering of pages.

Summarize

TikTok trending data has extremely high practical value, and stable, high-quality dynamic proxies are key tools for achieving efficient data collection. Choosing the right proxy is crucial for going further and climbing more steadily.