TikTok's own export hands you four lists: every video it played you, every search you typed, the videos you liked and saved, and the off-TikTok activity other companies reported about you. It also carries the ad interest categories it filed you under. It does not hand you your watch seconds, and it does not hand you the ranking.
The Count runs entirely on your device. No account, no email field, no upload. If you do not have the export yet, the request takes about ninety seconds and TikTok takes it from there.
What TikTok knows about you splits in two. There is the record of what you did, which it will hand you in a file. And there are the conclusions it drew from that record, which it hands you only in part, and only if you ask for the right tier.
Almost every article about this question answers from TikTok's privacy policy. A privacy policy is a list of what a company permits itself to collect. An export is what it will actually put in your hands. Those are different documents with different purposes, and only one of them can be checked by you, today, on your own laptop. This page answers from the file.
TikTok delivers a zip. The file that matters is named user_data_tiktok.json, or on older
exports user_data.json, and inside it the interesting content sits under a handful of named
lists. These are the literal key names, not a paraphrase.
| What you want to know | Where it lives in the file |
|---|---|
| Videos TikTok played you | The VideoList array. One record per video, each with a Date. This is the closest thing to a For You page log that exists. |
| Searches you typed | The SearchList array, each record carrying a Date and a SearchTerm. Repeats are not deduplicated, so the same term appearing thirty times is thirty rows. |
| Videos you liked or saved | The ItemFavoriteList array, with a Date per entry. |
| What other companies told TikTok about you | The OffTikTokActivityDataList array. Each record has a Source, which is the company that reported the activity. This is the section people find hardest to believe, because the companies are named. |
| The categories you were filed under | The Ads and data section, which is where the advertising interest categories sit. It arrives only on the All data request. reported |
Those key names are the ones our free Count matches. You do not have to take our word for it: the parser is plain JavaScript served at /count.js, the matching lives in its detector table, and you can read it before you drop anything on the page.
Watch history is unnerving in volume but not in kind. You already knew you watched those videos.
OffTikTokActivityDataList is different: it is a record of things you did somewhere else that
another company chose to report back, with that company's name attached in the Source field.
Nobody sends you a notification when this happens. It only becomes visible when you request the file.
The free Count prints two numbers off this list: how many events are in it, and how many distinct companies are behind them. Most people are wrong about both, in the same direction.
TikTok's own help page also notes that the last 24 to 48 hours of some categories may not be included in a given file, so a request made today is not a record of today. reported
The key names above are what our parser matches, and you can read that yourself in /count.js. Everything marked reported comes from TikTok's own published help pages and from consistent public reports, checked 2026-08-28, and platforms change these screens without telling anyone. When we confirm a claim by opening an export of our own, that line will say verified and carry the date we opened it. We do not blur the two.
We also cannot tell you what TikTok holds and does not export. Nobody outside the company can. What we can do is be precise about the part you are allowed to see, which is more than most pages on this question attempt.
You do not need to unzip anything or understand JSON. Drop the export on the free Count and it prints the real numbers: videos in your watch history, searches with your most repeated term, likes, off-TikTok events and the companies behind them. It runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account, no email field and no card.
The Count gives you the numbers. The Reading is the next question: not how many videos, but what the pattern across your files says the algorithms decided you are, written out in plain language you can argue with and mark wrong.
The full Reading is 6.99 a week or 69.99 a year. No free trial. There is a Refund button in your dashboard for 7 days, one tap, no reason required. The Count stays free forever either way.
| Claim | Source, checked 2026-08-28 |
|---|---|
| The file names and the key names inside them | Our own parser, readable at pupulcorp.com/count.js. It matches user_data.json and user_data_tiktok.json and reads the four lists named above. |
| Wait window, four day download window, missing recent hours | TikTok's help page, Requesting your data. reported |
| The All data tier requirement for ad interests | Our own inference file index, which tracks the tier each platform hides its conclusions behind. reported |
| How this wait compares to other platforms | Our own export wait times table, free as CSV under CC BY 4.0. |
TikTok's export hands you four lists: the videos it played you, the searches you typed, the videos you liked and saved, and the off-TikTok activity other companies reported about you. It also carries the advertising interest categories it filed you under, but only on the All data request.
Your export does not tell you. The watch history records that a video was shown to you and when, not the seconds you gave it. Any site that prints your exact watch time from this file is estimating from timestamps, and should say so.
In the Ads and data section of the export, and only if you requested All data rather than the Activity-only selection. Reported as of 2026-08-28. The Activity selection is faster and leaves out the part most people came for.
No, and this page does not pretend otherwise. A privacy policy describes what a company permits itself to collect. An export is what it will actually hand you. This page answers from the file, because the file is the part you can check.