TikTok is powered by a provider. Every other Source here is read by Nephia directly; TikTok’s public APIs do not serve third-party listening at all — the Research API forbids commercial use, the Display API returns only the authenticating creator’s own videos — and TikTok’s web surfaces cannot be paginated reliably from a server. So a metered provider answers these Watches, which is why they cost more and poll less often than the rest. On Nephia’s hosted API it is configured; if you self-host, set
SCRAPEBADGER_API_KEY. GET /account reports which Sources a deployment offers in capabilities.liveSources.The item
A TikTok Watch emits a TiktokVideo. The entity and the event are prefixed —tiktok_video.created, tiktokVideo — because YouTube already owns video.created and the bare video key. A receiver can tell the two platforms apart without reading watch.source.
A photo slideshow is a TiktokVideo too. TikTok models it as the same kind of post, it comes back in the same search results, and splitting it out would mean a keyword Watch silently dropping half its matches. isSlideshow carries the difference.
caption is the whole text of a TikTok — there is no title.
playCount is views, and it is what the Feed and Insights read as Reach.
No playback URL. TikTok’s play_addr and download_addr are signed and expire within hours, so an event that carried one would hand you a link that is dead by the time your job reads it. url is the durable way back to the post. coverUrl is a still image and may go stale the same way — treat a load failure as expected.
musicTitle and musicAuthor are frequently null, and that is upstream: the 2026 rights dispute leaves music metadata empty on a large share of posts.
Coverage
A Watch takes exactly one ofquery or user. Both, or neither, is a 400 — they are two different upstream calls at two different costs, so picking one for you would be a bill you did not ask for.
region routes the request through a signer and proxy for that locale. It is not a filter on where a video was made: the same query genuinely answers differently per region, which is the point. Supported regions are US, GB, CA, AU, IE, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, PT, SE, BR, MX, AR, JP, KR, ID, TH, VN, PH, MY, SG, TR, SA, AE and RU.
What a keyword Watch actually matches
The caption, and only the caption. TikTok’s own search also reads on-screen text and speech, but the API returns neither, so a video that says your brand out loud and never types it will not be found. This is the Source’s real limit and it is worth knowing before you rely on it. TikTok search has no “no results”. A term that matches nothing comes back with fuzzy, unrelated videos rather than an empty page. A probe on 2026-09-01 asked for a term nobody has ever posted and got eleven unrelated videos back. That makesmatch worth setting on this Source, where on most it is a refinement. The default, platform, passes the provider’s results through as they are — which here means TikTok’s own idea of a near-match, including videos that merely resemble your term or come from a similarly-named creator. Set match to word and Nephia holds every result to your term itself and drops the rest, so a quiet Watch is genuinely quiet rather than a stream of strangers.
It also means terms is not supported here and one term is the maximum: the upstream takes a single query string and does not honour a boolean join.
A creator Watch has no term to match against, so it reports everything that handle posts.
Interval: 3600–86400 seconds. Cap: 10 active Watches per Account. Each tick costs 40 credits.
The floor is not politeness, it is cost. The provider has no conditional request and no “since” parameter, so every tick is paid for upstream whether or not anything is new — including a tick that finds nothing. An hour is the interval at which that stays sustainable, and it is why your plan’s one-minute chip does not apply to this Source: the effective minimum is always the higher of your plan’s floor and the Source’s.
What an event carries
The first tick establishes a silent baseline and emits nothing. Later ticks emittiktok_video.created. webhook_url is optional — without it the Watch still records every match, readable through GET /v1/tiktok/watches/{id}/events. See Webhooks.
tiktokVideo.playCount > 10000.
Errors
A temporary provider failure is 503 and is not charged; the Watch reports it in its activity, readable throughGET /v1/tiktok/watches/{id}/activity. A throttle answers 429 and is not charged either.
A handle that does not exist is not an error. The upstream answers it with an empty page, so a Watch on a typo’d creator polls forever and never emits — which is why the handle’s shape is validated when the Watch is created. Check the spelling against the profile URL if a creator Watch stays silent.
A deployment with no provider key answers 503 on these routes and omits tiktok from capabilities.liveSources.