How to Scrape Weibo and Bilibili Without Login in 2026

TL;DR

• You can collect a lot of public Weibo and Bilibili data in 2026 without logging in: search results, comments, hot search, trending videos, creator profiles and danmaku summaries. Between them, our two actors cover 11 no-login modes.
• The hard limits are real. Without a session, Weibo search returns only the first page (about 10 posts per tab, about 30 unique posts per keyword per run). Bilibili hides subtitle text and creator upload lists behind login. Work with these limits, not against them: schedule frequent runs, and search instead of browsing a creator's space page.
• In a live run on Oct 20, 2026, the Weibo hot search board came back as 50 rows in 9.3 seconds. The #1 topic had 13x the heat of #50.
• Engagement is extremely concentrated. In our export of 200 Bilibili comments, the top 10% held 90% of all likes, so sort before you read.
• Price on Apify Store: $3 per 1,000 Weibo rows and $2 per 1,000 Bilibili rows with our actors. The most-used alternatives charge $35 and $20 per 1,000.

Weibo (微博) and Bilibili (哔哩哔哩, "B站") are two of the most useful public data sources on the Chinese internet. Weibo is where news breaks and brands get discussed. Its hot search board (热搜) is effectively China's live trending list. Bilibili is the largest long-form video community, with a young, very engaged audience and an overlay comment layer called danmaku (弹幕) that no Western platform has.

If you do market research, brand monitoring, academic work or trend tracking on China, you need both. Most guides start with "log in with Playwright and export your cookies". That works until the account gets rate-limited, the cookie expires in a few days, or someone asks whether you should be scraping under a personal account at all.

This guide takes the other route. It covers what you can reliably get without any login, what you can't, and how to build a monitoring loop around those limits. Every number in it comes from real runs of our actors, our benchmark exports, or the public Apify Store API.

Disclosure: we build and maintain the Weibo Scraper and Bilibili Scraper used here.

Contents

• Why scrape Weibo and Bilibili
• Login vs no login: the honest trade-off
• Scraping Bilibili without login
• Scraping Weibo without login
• What the data looks like
• What it costs
• Building a monitoring loop
• Code: Python and the Apify API
• Limits, ethics and data protection
• FAQ
• Try it

Why scrape Weibo and Bilibili

China had 1.125 billion internet users at the end of 2025, and 602 million of them had used generative AI (CNNIC 57th Statistical Report). Almost none of that conversation happens on platforms Western tools cover. Weibo and Bilibili are two of the biggest public windows into it:

	Weibo (微博)	Bilibili (哔哩哔哩)
Monthly active users	561 million (June 2026)	371 million (Q2 2026)
Daily active users	254 million	116.5 million
Audience	broad, national; news, celebrities, brands, public debate	young: average user age 26.5; 113 minutes a day on the platform
What it's for	breaking news, the hot search board, brand campaigns, public reaction	long-form video reviews, tutorials, gaming, tech, anime; comments and danmaku
Why brands care	real-time share of voice, crisis detection, campaign feedback	Gen Z product opinions, creator (UP主) marketing; top ad verticals are games, consumer electronics, internet services, e-commerce and automotive

Sources: Weibo Q2 2026 results; Bilibili Q2 2026 results and earnings call.

Who uses this data, and for what:

• Brands and agencies: track mentions, measure campaign reaction, find the creators who move your category, and catch a PR problem while it's still a comment thread.
• Market researchers: compare share of voice, follow topic momentum hour by hour, and benchmark engagement across categories.
• AI and LLM teams: fresh, timestamped, opinionated Chinese text for sentiment models, trend summarisation, evaluation sets and RAG over current events.

A few common, concrete use cases:

• Brand and product monitoring. What are people saying about 小米, 比亚迪 or your own brand this week? What's in the comments under the top reviews of your product category?
• Trend detection. Which topics are rising on the hot search board right now, and which are labelled 新 (new) or 热 (hot)?
• Creator research. Which Bilibili creators (UP主) in a niche have the most followers and the most engaged audiences?
• Content and sentiment analysis. Comments and danmaku are short, opinionated and timestamped, which makes them good raw material for sentiment models and LLM summaries.
• Academic research on public discourse, media and online communities.

All of these need public data at a steady cadence. None of them needs a logged-in account.

Login vs no login: the honest trade-off

Popular Weibo guides, including WebscrapingHQ's 2026 Weibo scraper guide and open-source projects like MediaCrawler, log in with a real account and reuse its cookies. That gets you deep search pagination and full timelines. It also gets you:

• cookies that expire within days, which means session-refresh code and monitoring;
• account-level rate limits and bans that land on a real person's account;
• a weaker legal and ethical position, because you're accessing data as a logged-in user rather than as any visitor.

The no-login approach gives up depth in exchange for reliability and a much simpler compliance story. Here's what it can and can't reach:

	Without login (our actors)	Needs login
Weibo hot search board	✅ full board
Weibo keyword search	✅ first page per tab (~30 unique posts per keyword per run)	deep pagination
Weibo post detail and comments	✅ paged with Weibo's own cursor
Weibo user profile and latest posts	✅ profile, about 10 latest posts	full timeline
Bilibili search	✅ up to ~1,000 results per keyword
Bilibili video stats, comments, replies	✅
Bilibili popular board, creator profiles	✅
Bilibili danmaku	✅ as a per-video summary
Bilibili subtitles / AI subtitles	only hasSubtitles true/false	✅ subtitle text
Bilibili creator upload list (space page)	❌ blocked by risk control. Search by creator name instead.	✅

For most monitoring work, the left column is enough. Where it isn't, the fix is usually frequency, not depth: if you can only see the newest 30 posts for a keyword, look every hour.

Scraping Bilibili without login

Bilibili Scraper has five modes:

Mode	What you get	Input
search	Videos matching keywords, with sort, length and date filters	searchQueries
video_detail	Views, likes, coins, favorites, shares, danmaku count, comment count, parts, hasSubtitles	videoUrls (links or BV ids)
video_comments	Top-level comments (popular or newest first), plus optional replies	videoUrls
popular	The popular / trending board	none
user_profile	Creator followers, following, video count, total likes, level, verification, bio	userIds

The includeComments, includeReplies, includeDanmaku and includeVideoDetails add-ons work on search, video_detail and popular, so one run can return videos and their comments.

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQueries": ["机械键盘"],
  "maxResults": 50,
  "sortOrder": "pubdate",
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxComments": 20
}

Danmaku are the bullet comments that fly across a Bilibili video. A popular video can have thousands. Rather than bill you for each one, includeDanmaku adds one summary row per video: number of danmaku fetched, unique senders, per-minute rate, peak minute and a timeline sample. That's usually what you want for analysis anyway, because the peak minute tells you which moment of the video people reacted to.

Plan around three Bilibili limits:

1. Subtitles need login. The actor reports hasSubtitles but can't download the text.
2. Creator upload lists need login. A creator's space page is blocked by risk control for anonymous visitors. To find a creator's videos, search for their name.
3. Search tops out at about 1,000 results per keyword. Split broad topics into narrower keywords or date windows.

Here's what the popular board looked like on the morning of Oct 20, 2026, from one popular run of 50 videos:

The median video had about 535,000 views and was about 6.5 minutes long. Viewers left a median 76 likes per 1,000 views, but only about 3 comments and 2 danmaku. Likes measure reach. Comments and danmaku are rarer and say much more, which is why most research projects want them.

Scraping Weibo without login

Weibo Scraper has six modes:

Mode	What you get	Input
search	Posts from the 综合 / 实时 / 热门 tabs, merged and deduplicated	searchQueries
hot_search	The live hot search board: rank, keyword, heat, label	none
post_detail	Full text, counts, images, hashtags and author	postUrls
post_comments	Comments, paged with Weibo's own cursor	postUrls
user_profile	Followers, following, post count, verification, bio	userIds
user_posts	A user's latest posts	userIds

The main limit: without a logged-in account, Weibo serves only the first page of search results. That's about 10 posts per tab, so up to about 30 unique posts per keyword per run after merging the three tabs. User timelines stop at about 10 latest posts. Comments, post details, profiles and the hot search board aren't limited this way.

{ "mode": "search", "searchQueries": ["小米", "比亚迪"], "includeComments": true, "maxComments": 20 }

{ "mode": "hot_search", "maxResults": 50 }

The hot search board is the fastest, cheapest signal Weibo offers. Our live run at 7:02 AM PT on Oct 20, 2026 returned 50 rows in 9.3 seconds, with no blocks:

Two things stand out. First, the curve is steep: #1 had 1,875,414 heat and #50 had 145,560, almost 13x less, and the top 10 entries held 41% of the board's total heat. Second, half the board (25 of 50) was labelled 新 (new). The board turns over fast, so snapshot it hourly if you want to catch topics on the way up rather than at the peak.

What the data looks like

Each actor writes one row per item to an Apify dataset. Rows have a type field, so posts, comments and replies can share a dataset:

{ "type": "comment", "postId": "5355477305394531", "commentId": "5355484431519240",
  "text": "…", "likesCount": 3, "replyCount": 0, "authorName": "…", "authorId": "…",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-18T…", "scrapedAt": "2026-10-18T…" }

Some shape numbers from our 882-row benchmark export (Oct 18, 2026):

Row type	Rows	Fields per row	Median text length
Weibo post	20	22	70.5 characters
Weibo comment	99	10	18 characters
Bilibili comment	200	11	25 characters
Bilibili reply	206	11	16.5 characters

Chinese comments are short. A median of 18–25 characters is a phrase, not a paragraph. That matters for analysis: one comment rarely carries enough context alone, so models do better with many comments together.

Likes are also very unevenly spread:

In our Bilibili export, the top 10% of comments held 90% of all likes, and the median comment had 2 likes. Weibo comments were less extreme, but the top 10% still held 66%. In practice:

• Sort by likes first if you're reading by hand or sending a sample to an LLM. The top 20 comments are what most viewers actually saw.
• Don't average likes. The mean is dominated by a few outliers. Use medians or percentiles.
• Use popular ordering for Bilibili comments when you want the consensus view, and newest-first when you're monitoring for new complaints.

If you're sending these rows to an LLM, both actors also support "outputFormat": "compact". In our token benchmark it cut tokens by 41.9% for Bilibili and 24.8% for Weibo versus pretty JSON.

What it costs

Both actors use pay-per-event pricing. You pay per row returned, and error rows are free:

	Weibo Scraper	Bilibili Scraper
Run start	$0.001	$0.001
Row (post, comment, reply, profile, hot-search entry, video)	$0.003 ($3 per 1,000)	$0.002 ($2 per 1,000)
Danmaku summary	n/a	$0.01 per video
Per-run cap	maxChargeUsd (default $5)	maxChargeUsd (default $5)

Example costs: 100 Bilibili search results are $0.20. Ten videos with 50 comments each come to 510 rows, about $1.02. Hourly Weibo hot search (50 rows) costs about $0.15 a run.

For context, here's what the most-used alternatives on Apify Store charge per result as of today:

These are per-result event prices from the public Apify Store API on Oct 20, 2026. Run-start fees and proxy costs aren't included, and the actors don't return identical fields, so compare what each one outputs as well as the price. The most-used Weibo actor charges $35 per 1,000 and the most-used Bilibili actor $20 per 1,000.

Building a monitoring loop

Because no-login Weibo search only shows the newest page, the winning pattern is small, frequent runs plus deduplication:

1. Save each input as an Apify Task: "brand-weibo-search", "hot-search", "category-bilibili-search".
2. Schedule them. Use 0 * * * * (hourly) for Weibo search and hot search, and 0 6 * * * (daily) for Bilibili search and comments.
3. Deduplicate on id. Use id for Weibo posts, commentId for comments and bvid for Bilibili videos. An hourly run will return many posts you already have, and that's expected.
4. Send the results somewhere. Use Apify's Google Sheets or webhook integrations, or Zapier or Make, or pull the dataset from your own code.
5. Summarize. A daily job reads the last 24 hours of rows and writes a trend or sentiment report. This is a good use of an LLM.

At 24 hourly hot-search runs a day, that's about $3.60 a day for a complete hourly record of China's trending list.

Code: Python and the Apify API

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

# Bilibili: search + top comments
bili = client.actor("dheerajitbhu/bilibili-scraper").call(run_input={
    "mode": "search", "searchQueries": ["原神"], "maxResults": 30,
    "includeComments": True, "maxComments": 20,
})
rows = list(client.dataset(bili["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())
comments = sorted((r for r in rows if r.get("type") == "comment"),
                  key=lambda r: r.get("likeCount") or 0, reverse=True)
for c in comments[:10]:
    print(c["likeCount"], c["text"][:60])

# Weibo: hot search board
weibo = client.actor("dheerajitbhu/weibo-scraper").call(run_input={
    "mode": "hot_search", "maxResults": 50,
})
for row in client.dataset(weibo["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(row.get("rank"), row.get("keyword"), row.get("heat"), row.get("label"))

Both actors run a daily self-test against the live sites. If Bilibili or Weibo blocks every request in a run, the run is marked failed instead of quietly finishing "green" with zero rows, so your schedule's failure alert actually fires. Both are maintained daily against the platforms' site changes and handle their access protections for you.

Limits, ethics and data protection

• Public data only. Neither actor ever logs in. Comment and post rows carry only the author's public nickname and numeric id. No avatars, no IP-region tags, no private fields.
• Personal data is still personal data. Nicknames and ids can identify people. If you're subject to GDPR, PIPL (China's Personal Information Protection Law) or similar rules, aggregate where you can, and keep only what your purpose needs.
• Be gentle. Hourly is plenty for monitoring. The actors pace their requests. Don't run 50 copies in parallel.
• Respect the platforms' terms and your own legal advice for your use case. This post explains what's technically reachable without login. It isn't legal advice.

FAQ

Can I scrape Weibo without an account in 2026?
Yes, for the hot search board, comments, post details, profiles and the first page of search results. Deep search pagination and full timelines need a logged-in session, which these actors deliberately don't use.

Why do I only get about 30 posts per Weibo keyword?
That's what Weibo serves to anonymous visitors: one page from each of the 综合, 实时 and 热门 tabs, merged and deduplicated. Schedule hourly runs and deduplicate on post id to build a continuous feed.

Can I download Bilibili subtitles or danmaku text?
Subtitle text needs login, so the actor reports hasSubtitles instead. Danmaku come as a per-video summary (count, unique senders, per-minute rate, peak minute, timeline sample) billed at $0.01 per video.

How do I get all videos from one Bilibili creator?
The creator's space page is blocked for anonymous visitors. Use search with the creator's name, and use user_profile for their follower and video counts.

Do I need Chinese proxies?
No. Access is handled for you inside the actors, with nothing to configure. Our live hot search run finished in 9.3 seconds with no blocks.

How fresh is the data?
It's fetched live at run time. scrapedAt is on every row.

Can I feed the output to an LLM?
Yes. Set "outputFormat": "compact" to cut input tokens (by 42% for Bilibili and 25% for Weibo in our benchmark), and sort by likes before sampling.

Try it

• Weibo Scraper: search, hot search, comments, profiles. $3 per 1,000 rows.
• Bilibili Scraper: search, video stats, comments, popular, creators, danmaku summaries. $2 per 1,000 rows.

Leave the inputs at their defaults for a first run, or paste one of the JSON examples above. Questions or a mode you need? Email [e-mail].

Data in this post: live runs on Oct 20, 2026 (Weibo hot search run alIwu4CFqqhdwEd2T, Bilibili popular, 50 videos), our 882-row benchmark export from Oct 18, 2026, and the public Apify Store API on Oct 20, 2026.