TikTok Location Scraper: what a place is posting

Getting the URL right is most of the work

Three inputs, and only one of them takes thought. TikTok has no separate place page to copy a link from. A location is a tag URL with a flag on the end, and that is the form the actor expects.

• The flag is the whole trick

  startUrls

  $0.006per location

  ~20 posts included

  A tag URL carrying ?location=true. That query string is what turns a hashtag page into a place.

  https://www.tiktok.com/tag/newyork?location=true

• startUrls (bulk)

  × $0.006one fee each

  20 free per place

  Many places in one run. The listing puts no cap on how many geographic areas a single run may cover.

  tag/newyork · tag/miami · tag/austin

• maxItems

  ÷ $0.0003cap the spend

  1,000 ≈ $0.30

  The ceiling on posts for the entire run. The listing frames it directly as a budget control.

  1000

Because the free allowance is per location rather than per run, twenty places at twenty posts each costs $0.12 in query fees and nothing in items, which is the cheapest way to watch a lot of ground at once.

One city deep, or many cities wide

The interesting decision here is not what to scrape but how to spread the budget: a thousand posts from one place, or the first twenty from fifty places, cost roughly the same and answer completely different questions.

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/tag/newyork?location=true"
  ],
  "maxItems": 1000
}

{
  "id": "7310663737562631457",
  "title": "#duet with @The Tus House…",
  "views": 2597080,
  "likes": 200239,
  "comments": 894,
  "shares": 493,
  "bookmarks": 5597,
  "hashtags": ["duet", "steak", "egg"],
  "postPage": "https://www.tiktok.com/@gordonramsayofficial/video/7310663737562631457"
}

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/tag/miami?location=true"
  ],
  "maxItems": 200
}

{
  "channel": {
    "name": "Gordon Ramsay",
    "username": "gordonramsayofficial",
    "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@gordonramsayofficial",
    "verified": false,
    "followers": 39745807,
    "following": 513,
    "videos": 451
  }
}

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/tag/austin?location=true"
  ],
  "maxItems": 20
}

{
  "video": {
    "width": 648,
    "height": 576,
    "ratio": "540p",
    "duration": 57.399
  },
  "song": {
    "title": "original sound - thetushouse",
    "artist": "The Tus House",
    "duration": 64
  }
}

What a place-filed post looks like

Four blocks, and the listing documents all thirty-two fields by name. The notable thing is what is not in the list: there is no geographic block, because the geography was the question rather than part of the answer.

• 8

  Post and reach

  The row itself

  • id, title
  • views, likes, comments
  • shares, bookmarks
  • hashtags
  • postPage

• 9

  Creator

  channel

  • name, username, id, url
  • avatar
  • verified
  • followers, following
  • videos

• 7

  Video file

  video

  • width, height, ratio
  • duration
  • url, direct download
  • cover, thumbnail

• 0

  Geography

  Not returned

  • No latitude or longitude
  • No place name or location id
  • Provenance is the URL you sent

channel.followers is the field that does the work on a location run. A place’s feed mixes residents with tourists and with national accounts passing through; follower count and video count are the cheapest way to tell which is which.

Four things to know before the first run

Two come from the listing’s input documentation, one from its pricing section, and one from the shape of the output itself.

• 01

  The URL needs ?location=true on it

  The listing gives the form as tiktok.com/tag/<place>?location=true. Without the flag it is an ordinary hashtag URL, which is a different query against different content.

• 02

  The free allowance is per location, not per run

  Each location query includes roughly the first page of about twenty posts. Ten locations means ten allowances, which is why a wide sweep is so much cheaper per place than a deep dive.

• 03

  Label your own provenance

  Nothing in a row names the place. Run one location at a time, or tag the dataset on the way out, if you ever intend to compare places against each other.

• 04

  Never filter inside customMapFunction

  The listing is explicit that the map function is for transformation and that filtering with it may result in automatic bans. Use maxItems to control volume instead.

Free accounts run in demo mode: 5 runs a month, 10 items each.

Six worked examples, checked

These are the listing’s own figures, recomputed from the two charge events. All six reproduce exactly, $0.006 a location with about twenty posts inside it, then $0.0003 for each post beyond.

Compare the third row against the fourth: five hundred posts spread over five cities cost half what a thousand from one city cost, because four extra allowances came with the four extra queries. Breadth is subsidised here in a way depth is not.

Who works a map instead of a feed?

The listing points at local creator discovery, regional content leaders and geographic market research. What they have in common is a question about a place that a hashtag cannot answer, because a hashtag is a topic and a location is an address.

• Local influencer scouting

  One place, deep

  Find creators posting from a city and separate residents from national accounts by follower count and output

  $0.30 per 1,000 posts

• Regional market research

  Many places, one run each

  Compare what different cities post about, with each dataset labelled by the URL that produced it

  $0.60 across 10 cities

• Tourism and destination marketing

  A cheap scan, weekly

  Watch the first page of a destination tag on a schedule, paying only the query fee

  $0.12 per 20-place sweep

• Venue and hospitality

  One place, shallow

  See what is being filmed at a location without commissioning anything, six tenths of a cent a look

  $0.006 per check

• Trend spotting

  A cheap scan, then pivot

  Catch a sound recurring across a city’s posts, then take song.id into the Music Scraper

  $0.03 per 100-post probe

Automating a sweep

The actor is apidojo/tiktok-location-scraper. Because the rows arrive without a place on them, the pattern worth writing once is the loop that runs each location on its own and stamps the result.

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
ACTOR = "apidojo/tiktok-location-scraper"

def place_url(slug):
    return f"https://www.tiktok.com/tag/{slug}?location=true"

def sweep(slugs, per_place=20):
    """One run per place: billing is identical and provenance survives."""
    out = []
    for slug in slugs:
        run = client.actor(ACTOR).call(run_input={
            "startUrls": [place_url(slug)],
            "maxItems": per_place,
        })
        for row in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
            out.append({**row, "place": slug})   # the field the actor cannot give you
    return out

rows = sweep(["newyork", "miami", "austin"])

for r in rows:
    print(r["place"], r["channel"]["followers"], r["views"], r["title"][:40])

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const placeUrl = (slug) => `https://www.tiktok.com/tag/${slug}?location=true`;

const run = await client.actor('apidojo/tiktok-location-scraper').call({
  startUrls: [placeUrl('newyork')],
  maxItems: 1000,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

// A place's feed mixes locals with national accounts passing through.
const locals = items.filter((p) => p.channel.followers < 100_000);
console.log(locals.length, 'of', items.length, 'from smaller accounts');

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apidojo~tiktok-location-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls":["https://www.tiktok.com/tag/newyork?location=true"],"maxItems":20}'

The listing quotes 400–600 posts per second, so a deep single-city run finishes in seconds. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel from the Storage tab, or read it straight off the API.

TikTok Location Scraper FAQ

Where TikTok Location Scraper fits