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RedNote Content Ideation: Find What's Gaining Traction with Search and Topic APIs

Rnote API Team · · 4 views · 中文
Xiaohongshu Data Content Ideation Search API Topics

The hardest part of publishing on RedNote (Xiaohongshu) usually isn't the writing — it's deciding what to write. Pick a topic on instinct, publish, and you find out a week later that the direction was wrong.

Here is a repeatable loop that turns "what's gaining traction right now" from a hunch into a query, using the Rnote API search and topic endpoints. No account farming, no scraper to maintain.

Three steps

1. Bound the space with keyword search

Start from a term you are sure about ("camping gear"), call GET /api/v2/crawler/search/notes with sort_type=popularity_descending and a one-week time_filter. What comes back is the hottest notes for that term in the last week, not the all-time winners — historical hits tell you very little about what to publish today.

Then pull the term's autocomplete with GET /api/v2/crawler/search/recommend. Those suggestions are the platform's own high-frequency searches: camping gear beginner, camping gear checklist, camping gear budget. Every suffix is a concrete angle, handed to you for free.

2. Size the direction with topics

Search tells you what exists; topics tell you how big it is. Find the matching topic with GET /api/v2/crawler/search/groups, then read its scale with GET /api/v2/crawler/topic/info and page the newest notes with GET /api/v2/crawler/topic/feed.

A useful rule of thumb: large topic, thin recent output usually means demand exists but competition has not piled in yet. A topic that is both large and getting hundreds of new notes a day is a poor bet for a young account.

3. Take the winners apart

Once the direction is set, fetch the 20–30 highest-engagement notes from step 1 with GET /api/v2/crawler/note/image (or note/video) and lay title, cover, opening lines and hashtags into one table.

Look at three things: the title pattern (question, listicle, or result-first), the cover's information density (photo only vs. big overlaid text), and whether the first two lines of the body already state the payoff. That layer is where the winners usually have something in common — not the topic itself.

A loop you can copy

  1. Every Monday: 10 head terms × search (last week, by popularity) → dump to a table.
  2. Diff against last week's run for the same term. Newly ranked notes are this week's signal.
  3. From those, take the five with the fastest engagement growth, dissect the structure, turn it into this week's plan.

The whole loop costs a handful of calls — far less than a single paid test.

Prefer not to write code?

The two most-used steps ship as no-code tools in the dashboard: Topic Insights gives you the note distribution under a topic, and Keyword Export dumps search results to a spreadsheet. Validate the direction with the tools first, then automate once it works.

Get started

Sign up free for credits — only successful calls are billed. The endpoint list is in the docs and prices are on the pricing page. For background, see API vs building your own scraper.

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