Social Media API
Zhihu API
Read 知乎 questions with full answer threads, column articles, expert profiles, and topics — high-quality long-form Chinese text as structured JSON.
- Questions with full answer threads — China's Quora-meets-Medium
- Long-form column articles ideal for LLM training corpora
- Expert profiles with credentials and topic taxonomies
$0.05 free credit on sign-up · no credit card · from $0.001/request
One request, structured JSON
1curl -X GET "https://api.tikhub.io/api/v1/zhihu/web/fetch_column_article_detail?article_id=1234567890" \2 -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"1{2 "code": 200,3 "data": {4 "id": "1234567890",5 "title": "示例文章标题",6 "author": { "name": "作者名称", "headline": "示例认证" },7 "voteup_count": 12400,8 "comment_count": 860,9 "content": "<p>...</p>",10 "created": 171720000011 }12}Get your API key at user.tikhub.io/dashboard/api — or follow the getting-started guide.
What's in the Zhihu API
TikHub's Zhihu API provides structured access to 知乎 — China's Quora-meets-Medium. Pull questions with full answer threads, column articles, user profiles with credentials, topic taxonomies, and search results. High-quality, long-form Chinese text that's ideal for LLM training and research.
Zhihu Web API
What teams build with the Zhihu API
Marketing & brand
- Expert-opinion tracking on products
- Industry-discussion monitoring
- Brand-perception research
- Topic-trend detection
Research & data
- Consumer decision-journey studies
- Knowledge-trend analysis
- Expert-sentiment research
- Q&A corpus building
AI & agents
- High-quality Chinese Q&A corpora
- RAG over expert answers
- Fine-tuning datasets
- Knowledge extraction
High-quality long-form Chinese text
Zhihu (知乎) is China's knowledge community — long, considered answers and column articles from credentialed experts. That makes it one of the highest-quality sources of Chinese-language text for LLM training and research. TikHub returns questions with full answer threads, articles, expert profiles, and topic taxonomies as structured JSON.
Zhihu API endpoints
A reference of the most-used Zhihu endpoints. Browse the full set in the API reference or the documentation.
Zhihu Web API
Questions with answer threads, long-form column articles, hot lists, and dedicated search across articles, users, topics, and scholars.
Tips & troubleshooting
Hard-won operational notes for working with Zhihu data in production.
Zhihu is a high-quality text source
Unlike short-form social platforms, Zhihu (知乎) answers and column articles are long, considered, and often written by credentialed experts. That makes the content unusually high-value for LLM training, RAG, and research — closer to long-form articles than social posts. The article-detail endpoint returns full content you can ingest directly.
Four search verticals, including scholars
Zhihu search is split into articles, users, topics, and scholars (V3 endpoints). The scholar search is distinctive — it surfaces credentialed experts on a subject — which is useful for finding authoritative voices and for building expert-opinion datasets that go beyond anonymous social chatter.
Hot lists track Chinese knowledge trends
fetch_hot_list and fetch_hot_recommend surface what's trending in Zhihu's knowledge community right now — the questions and topics Chinese professionals are actively discussing. Tracked over time, they're a read on emerging interests and concerns that's more considered than a fast-moving social hot-search.
Zhihu API: high-quality long-form Chinese text in 2026
TikHub's Zhihu API reads public 知乎 data — questions with answer threads, column articles, expert profiles, topics, and search — through plain REST calls. Here's how it works, why it's a prized text source for AI, and which option fits which job.
How does the Zhihu API work?
What is the Zhihu API?
The TikHub Zhihu API is a RESTful interface that returns structured JSON for public content on 知乎 — China's Quora-meets-Medium, where long, considered answers and column articles come from credentialed experts. You request questions with their answer threads, articles, profiles, topics, or search results and get clean, typed data, with no Chinese developer registration.
Its standout quality is the content itself: long-form, expert-authored Chinese text, which is among the best available sources for LLM training and serious research.
How do you access and use it?
Create a TikHub account, generate an API key, and make an HTTP GET request with the key in the Authorization header. Pull an article or a question's answer thread by ID, browse hot lists for trending topics, or use the four search verticals (articles, users, topics, scholars) to find content and experts. Follow cursors to paginate long answer threads.
What are the benefits of using the Zhihu API?
Why is Zhihu data prized for AI?
Most social data is short, noisy, and low-context. Zhihu is the opposite: answers and articles are long, structured, and written to inform, often by people with real credentials in the subject. That signal-to-noise ratio makes it one of the highest-quality Chinese-language text sources for fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, and knowledge extraction — a corpus closer to curated articles than to social chatter.
Who benefits, and what do they save?
AI teams building Chinese Q&A and knowledge corpora, researchers studying expert opinion and consumer decision journeys, and analysts tracking how Chinese professionals discuss products and industries. TikHub absorbs the scrape against a protected Chinese platform, delivering the content as structured data ready for a pipeline.
What are common use cases and alternatives?
What are the common use cases?
Building high-quality Chinese Q&A corpora for LLM training and RAG, tracking expert opinion on industries and products, researching consumer decision journeys, and monitoring knowledge-trend hot lists. The scholar search in particular supports expert-discovery and authoritative-source workflows.
What are the alternatives, and which is best?
Zhihu's official API is limited and gated; open-source scrapers exist but carry the usual reliability and maintenance burden against a protected platform. For reliable access to long-form, expert-authored Chinese content and its search verticals without the upkeep, a managed API like TikHub is the practical choice — one key, also covering WeChat, Weibo, and the rest of the Chinese knowledge and social landscape.
Zhihu API — frequently asked questions
Do I need a Zhihu developer account?
No. Create a free TikHub account, generate an API key, and call REST endpoints directly — no Zhihu developer application, app review, or OAuth.
What Zhihu data can I extract?
Public questions with answer threads, column articles, user profiles, topic data, comments, and search results.
How much does the Zhihu API cost?
Pay-as-you-go from $0.001 per request, with automatic daily volume discounts down to $0.0005 at 30,000+ requests/day. New accounts get $0.05 free credit (~50 requests) — no credit card required.
Is using a Zhihu API like this legal?
TikHub only returns publicly available Zhihu data — content any visitor can see without an account. It does not bypass authentication or access private information. Zhihu is a Chinese platform, so the relevant constraints are its own Terms of Service and China's data and cross-border rules rather than US case law; automated access can lead to account or IP blocks, which TikHub's infrastructure absorbs for you. You remain responsible for how you store, process, and use the data — especially any personal data and any onward transfer across borders.
One key, every platform
The Zhihu API shares its key and JSON format with 15 other platforms — adding Instagram or Douyin is a one-line change.