Xiaohongshu KOL Finder: RedNote Influencers Scored by AI on the Apify Store →

How to find Xiaohongshu KOLs for your brand — in English, with the Xiaohongshu KOL Finder

Tutorial article for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium, Hashnode. The owner publishes it and records the URL in brief.json → marketing.links.

The problem

You sell outdoor gear, skincare or coffee and want Chinese consumers to hear about it. They discover products on Xiaohongshu (小红书, RedNote), through creators — KOLs and the smaller KOCs whose honest reviews get saved and shared. Finding the right ones is slow if you do not read Chinese: you guess the search words, open notes one by one, copy each author's profile into a translator, look up followers, work out whether their notes actually get likes and saves, weed out brand and shop accounts, and finally write a first message in Chinese. For 20 creators that is a day of work — ≈ 12 minutes per creator in our own timing — and next week you do it again, re-reading the ones you already saw.

The official route, Pugongying (蒲公英), needs a verified Chinese brand account. Raw RedNote scrapers on Apify return thousands of Chinese note rows and bill every one of them.

Step by step

  1. Open the Actor and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with a free demo on 6 sample camping creators. Press Start: in about a second you get 4 qualified creators — the magazine account and the 620k head creator above the follower cap are dropped for free. The Shortlist view (docs/img/shortlist.svg) shows tier, followers, engagement rate, score and an English summary.
  2. Type your niche in English. Replace "camping gear" with your niche ("clean skincare") and write one line about your brand in the brand brief: product, price, audience, goal. The AI turns the niche into the Chinese terms creators use (as camping gear → 露营装备, 露营好物 in the demo) and searches RedNote on your Apify account, capped by "Max source spend" ($1 by default).
  3. Let the free pre-filters work. Notes are grouped by author. Authors you already have, brand and shop names, old notes and authors without enough likes are dropped before any paid profile lookup; only the best 25 are looked up. Each creator then gets a follower tier, engagement rate, likes & collects per note, account type and the contact they print in their bio (合作 / 商务 / 📮 / e-mail).
  4. Read the AI verdict. With AI on, each creator gets a 0–100 brand-fit score with reasons, an English summary and bio, translated note titles, risk and sponsored-post signals, a suggested collaboration (seeding, paid post, affiliate, ambassador) and a Chinese first DM with its English gloss. The Outreach view (docs/img/outreach.svg) is your contact sheet.
  5. Export or connect. Download CSV / Excel, open the Shortlist in Google Sheets, or send rows to a webhook / CRM.

What a run costs

With the form's defaults — 1 niche, 3 Chinese terms × 30 notes and up to 25 profile lookups — the source Actor bills your Apify account for 115 rows × $0.00499 + 28 run starts × $0.00005 ≈ $0.58. That typically yields ≈ 10 qualified creators (estimate): $0.68 in total with rules only ($0.01 per creator here) or $1.07 with the AI (≈ $0.049 per creator all in). Your first 25 qualified creators are free here, so the first real search costs only the source's $0.58.

Automate it

Schedule the saved task weekly and put your e-mail into "E-mail me the new creators". The cross-run memory drops creators you already have before the paid profile lookup, so each week you pay only for new ones.

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("<your-apify-username>/xiaohongshu-kol-finder-ai").call(run_input={
    "nicheKeywords": ["clean skincare"],
    "brandBrief": "European clean-skincare brand, vitamin C serum (¥329), seeding with KOCs",
    "maxQualified": 50,
    "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 1.0,
}, timeout_secs=3600)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["name"], item["score"], item["label"], item["url"])

Book the paid collaborations through Pugongying, where Xiaohongshu requires them to be reported — use this list to find and shortlist the creators worth it.

Xiaohongshu KOL Finder: RedNote Influencers Scored by AI on the Apify Store →