Reading the Xiaohongshu Hot List Programmatically

The Xiaohongshu hot list is the platform's own ranking of trending topics. For anyone doing content planning on the platform it is the highest-signal, lowest-effort input available: it tells you what the recommendation system is currently pushing, before that shows up in your competitors' output.

What is in a hot list entry

Each entry is a topic string with a rank and a heat score, not a post. That distinction matters for how you use it: the list tells you the subject is rising, and you then search that subject to find the notes actually performing under it. Treat the hot list as a query generator rather than as content.

curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer sk_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' \
  'https://api.spiderhubs.com/openapi/v1/contentcreator/xiaohongshu/web_v3/fetch_hot_list'

How fast it moves

Ranks shuffle continuously, but the membership of the list turns over far more slowly — a topic that enters typically stays for several hours to a day. Polling every fifteen minutes gets you rank noise and near-identical payloads. Hourly is enough to catch entries and exits; four-hourly is enough if you are producing content on a daily cycle.

Deduplicating across polls

Key on the topic string, not on the rank or the position in the array. Store a first-seen and a last-seen timestamp per topic and update the latter on each poll. This gives you two things a raw snapshot cannot: the age of a trend, and the moment it dropped off — which is usually the more actionable signal, because it tells you the window has closed.

• First-seen — how early you caught it.
• Last-seen — whether it is still live.
• Peak rank — how big it actually got, versus how big it was when you noticed.

Turning a topic into a content brief

Once a topic is worth acting on, search it for notes and sort by engagement to see the format that is working — whether the winners are image carousels or video, how long the captions run, which hashtags recur. That is the brief. The hot list tells you what to write about; the top notes under it tell you how.