How KOLens works

1. 1

   Discover

   Search any TikTok keyword. KOLens runs the search live and returns up to 200 of the most relevant creators in minutes, each with follower count, engagement rate, avg views, and audience country mix already computed from real video data.

2. 2

   Vet

   Filter by follower band, engagement rate, audience country, and creator-vs-seller flag. KOLens automatically grades each creator's authenticity from 8 sub-signals (engagement ratio, comment quality, view consistency, audience geography, follower-burst detection, etc.) so you can drop the low-confidence accounts in seconds, not hours.

3. 3

   Contact

   KOLens crawls every creator's bio links and harvests email addresses, websites, Instagram handles, and YouTube channels. Where the creator listed a contact email, you get a verified email you can pitch — no manual scraping.

4. 4

   Track

   Save creators to KOL Lists, monitor growth over time on the Watchlist (follower deltas, engagement drift, silent-quit detection), and pipe alerts to email, Slack, or any webhook URL when a creator's stats shift past your threshold.

The flow at a glance

Why this workflow exists

Anyone who’s tried to run a TikTok influencer campaign manually knows the wall: TikTok’s search surface returns videos, not creators, and there’s no native filter for follower count, engagement rate, audience country, or contact info. To assemble a 50-creator shortlist by hand you have to scroll the keyword feed, click into each video, click through to the creator profile, eyeball the recent posts, click out to the bio link, hunt for an email on the linked site, and then paste everything into a spreadsheet. Six hours later you have twenty rows and no way to know which of them are actually worth pitching.

KOLens compresses that loop into four steps. The discovery step replaces the scroll-and-click phase with a single live keyword search that returns up to 200 ranked creators in minutes. The vetting step replaces eyeball judgement with an 8-signal authenticity score and structured filters. The contact step replaces manual bio-link hunting with an automatic crawler that harvests every email, website, and cross-platform handle the creator published. The tracking step replaces re-checking profiles by hand with a watchlist that pings you when a creator’s stats shift.

The compression is real and measurable. The published case study Finding 50 US baby-stroller KOLs in one Friday afternoon walks through the exact sequence: 65 minutes of work, $3.20 in scrape spend, 50 vetted US-audience creators with contact emails ready for outreach. The same brief by hand is a two-day project for a junior marketer.

The point isn’t that KOLens does anything you couldn’t do yourself with infinite patience. The point is that the work that used to fill a week now fills an afternoon, which means a brand or agency can actually run the influencer-discovery loop on every product launch instead of once a quarter.

Manual TikTok search vs KOLens

What you need to get started

1. 1

   Pick a plan

   Plans start at $29 / month for 50 searches. See the full breakdown.

   View pricing
2. 2

   Sign up

   Create an account in under a minute. No credit card needed for the free trial searches.

   Sign up free
3. 3

   Run your first scrape

   Submit any TikTok keyword. The demo workflow runs even before you've picked a plan, so you can see the output shape first.

   Open search

Frequently asked questions

How does KOLens find TikTok creators?

KOLens takes any keyword you submit and runs a live TikTok search through a managed scraper, then pulls the most relevant videos and the creators behind them. For each creator we compute follower count, engagement rate, average views, audience country mix, and a creator-vs-seller flag from the actual video data — so the shortlist you see is ranked by real performance, not by who paid for placement.

Where does the engagement rate come from?

Engagement rate is computed from the creator's recent videos that KOLens pulled during your search. We take likes + comments + shares per video, divide by views (or by follower count, depending on the view), and report both the median and the average so you can see whether one viral hit is skewing the number. Full methodology and the formula breakdown live on the TikTok engagement rate calculator page.

How does KOLens get creator emails?

After the search returns the creator list, KOLens crawls each creator's bio link tree — the URL they put in their TikTok bio, plus any Linktree, Beacons, or personal-site they link to — and extracts email addresses, contact forms, Instagram handles, and YouTube channels. If the creator listed an email anywhere in their public link tree, you get it in the export. Nothing is guessed.

Is the scraping legal?

KOLens reads the same publicly-visible TikTok pages anyone can open in a browser, through a managed scraping infrastructure (Apify). We don't bypass logins, we don't access private accounts, and we only collect data the creator chose to make public on TikTok. Emails come from the creator's own bio links — if they didn't publish it, we don't have it. This is the same legal posture as any commercial influencer-discovery tool.

How long does a search take?

A live search returning ~200 creators with full stats and bio-link enrichment typically completes in 5 to 10 minutes. The 4-step end-to-end workflow — search, filter, export emails, save to a list — runs in under 15 minutes for a typical campaign brief. The published baby-stroller case study went from 'cold keyword' to '50 vetted US creators with emails' in 65 minutes of actual work.

Can I integrate KOLens with Claude / MCP?

Yes. KOLens ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at https://kolens.ai/mcp that exposes the full search, list, and watchlist surface as tools any MCP-compatible client can call — including Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and the Cowork plugin. You can also run the bundled Cowork plugin (kolens.plugin) for a stdio MCP server with the kol-search and kol-research skills pre-wired.