How to Find the TikTok Video With the Most Likes in Your Niche

The short version: the fastest way to find the most-liked TikTok video in your niche is TikTok's own Creative Center trending tool filtered by industry and region, backed up by the search bar's "Most liked" sort filter and a manual scroll through your top three niche hashtags. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes done, and the video that turns up will often surprise you, sometimes because the account that has the most likes isn't the one that made the video.

I get asked this at least once a month by clients who want to "do what the top video did" in their space. It sounds simple. It isn't quite, because TikTok doesn't hand you a neat "sort by likes across the whole platform" button. You have to build the answer from three or four smaller tools stitched together. Here's exactly how I do it for clients, including the bit that most guides on this topic skip.

Why there's no single "most liked" button

TikTok's algorithm is built around relevance and freshness, not a leaderboard. The platform wants you watching new things it thinks you'll like, not a static hall of fame. That's a deliberate product choice, not a missing feature, and it's worth remembering when you're chasing "the top video" as if it's a fixed, findable fact. It shifts by the hour as new videos overtake old ones, especially in fast-moving niches like fitness, comedy, or anything food related.

So what you're really doing when you "find the most liked video in your niche" is finding the current leader within a specific search, hashtag, or category, at the moment you look. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Step one: use TikTok's own search filter

Since TikTok added sort filters to search results, this is the quickest legitimate route:

• Open the TikTok app and tap the search icon
• Type your niche keyword, for example "meal prep" or "small business tips"
• Tap into the results, then tap "Filters" at the top
• Under "Sort by," choose "Most liked"
• Set a date range if you want (last month, last three months, last year, or all time)

This gives you a ranked list rather than a relevance-based guess. The catch: it only searches videos that match your exact keyword or its close variants, so a video that never uses your search term in the caption, sound, or on-screen text won't show up, even if it's the most-liked video in your niche by any reasonable definition.

Step two: TikTok Creative Center

This is the tool almost nobody outside agencies uses, and it's free. TikTok Creative Center's "Top Ads" and "Trending" sections let you filter by industry (beauty, fashion, food and beverage, gaming, and so on), region, and time period, then sort results by likes, shares, or comments. It's built for advertisers, but there's nothing stopping you using it to research organic trends in a niche.

I use this weekly with clients. For a pet grooming client last year, filtering "Pets" by likes over 30 days threw up a grooming transformation video sitting at 6.1 million likes, made by an account with under 40,000 followers. That gap, huge likes, small following, is usually the clearest sign you've found something worth studying rather than a fluke boosted by an already-massive audience.

Step three: the manual hashtag scroll (still worth doing)

Tools miss things. Go to your top two or three niche hashtags directly, tap into each one, and look at the videos TikTok has pinned near the top of the hashtag page. These aren't always the single highest-liked video ever posted under that tag, but they're close, and TikTok tends to keep high-performing videos visible there for months. Scroll through the first 20 to 30 results and note the like counts. In my experience this takes about ten minutes per hashtag and regularly turns up a video the search filter missed because the caption never used the exact keyword you searched.

Step four: cross-check with a Google search

Search "site:tiktok.com" plus your niche keyword in Google. It's clunky, TikTok's SEO indexing is inconsistent, but it occasionally surfaces older, high-performing videos that have since dropped out of TikTok's own in-app search relevance because they're no longer "fresh." I've found videos this way that were two years old and still sitting on millions of likes, completely invisible in a normal in-app search because TikTok naturally favours recency.

The uncomfortable part nobody mentions

Here's the thing I've learned doing this for real clients rather than writing about it in the abstract: the account sitting on the most likes in your niche is quite often not the account that made the video.

Repost and compilation accounts exist purely to lift high-performing content from smaller creators, repost it with minimal or no credit, and ride the algorithm using an already-large following. I found this the hard way while researching for a skincare client. The single most-liked "vitamin C serum" video under the relevant hashtag, sitting around 3.8 million likes, was posted by a general beauty aggregator account with 1.2 million followers. The actual dermatologist who'd filmed and explained the technique originally had posted the same clip nine days earlier to her own 11,000-follower account, where it sat at just under 6,000 likes. Same footage. Same words. A thousand-times difference in reach, none of it earned by the person who made it.

That matters for two reasons. First, if you're benchmarking "what works in my niche" against the aggregator's version, you're studying distribution, not content quality, and those are different skills. Second, if you're a creator worried about someone stealing your best clip, this is exactly how it happens, and TikTok's reporting tools for stolen content are slow and inconsistent at best. Worth knowing before you get excited about a "top video" that isn't really a top creator.

What to do with the video once you've found it

Finding the video is the easy half. Once you have it, break it down rather than just admiring the like count:

• Watch the first two seconds on mute. Does it work without sound? Most high-like videos do.
• Check the caption length. Very short or a single question mark performs differently to a long, keyword-stuffed caption.
• Note the format: talking head, text-on-screen, voiceover, slideshow, or trending sound overlay.
• Read the top 20 comments. This tells you what the audience connected with, which is often different from what the creator thought they were making.
• Check posting time and day if it's visible, and compare against your own TikTok analytics to see if your audience is even active at that hour.

If the format is a slideshow rather than a video, don't skip it, slideshows regularly outperform filmed video in niches like finance, book content, and B2B tips because they're faster to produce and easier to make information-dense. I've written a full walkthrough on building a TikTok slideshow for your business if that's the format you find dominating your niche's top spot.

Likes are not the metric that pays your bills

Here's the part I'll say plainly because most people researching this topic don't want to hear it: the most-liked video in your niche is very often not the most profitable one for the account that made it. Likes are a vanity signal that TikTok surfaces prominently because it's satisfying to see a big number, not because it correlates with sales, leads, or client enquiries. I've had client videos sit at 400 likes and generate six enquiries worth real money, and I've had videos hit 90,000 likes and generate nothing beyond a spike in follower count that unfollowed within a fortnight.

It's a similar dynamic to what happens on Facebook, where page likes alone stopped meaning much to advertisers years ago. If you're curious how that shift played out on another platform, I covered it in how many Facebook page likes you need to get paid in 2026, and the lesson transfers almost exactly to TikTok.

So use "the most liked video in my niche" as a research exercise, a way to reverse-engineer hooks, pacing, and topics that clearly resonate, not as a target to hit for its own sake. Study why the video worked, borrow the mechanics, then measure your own version against enquiries or sales, not likes.

A quick word on tools beyond TikTok's own dashboard

There's a growing pile of third-party trend and analytics tools that promise to rank TikTok content by engagement across a niche automatically. Some are useful for saving time, particularly ones built on top of AI models that can scan thousands of videos and cluster them by theme faster than a human scrolling ever could. If you want a sense of how crowded and fast-moving that AI tool space has become, I broke down the real numbers in how many AI video generators exist right now. Treat these tools as a shortcut for the scroll, not a replacement for watching the video yourself, because the tools can tell you the like count but not why the comment section is losing its mind over one specific joke at second four.

Why the same account keeps showing up at the top

Once you've done this exercise across two or three niches, a pattern shows up fast: it's usually not random which accounts dominate the top-liked spot. I've written more on the mechanics behind this in why some TikTok accounts get more likes than others, but the short version is consistency in posting time, a recognisable format the audience learns to expect, and hooks built in the first 1.5 seconds beat production quality every single time. That's more useful to copy than the raw like count.

One last practical note: if you're tracking a specific niche competitor closely and relying on TikTok's push alerts to know when they post something big, be aware that TikTok notifications drop out more often than people realise, so don't build your whole monitoring routine around them. A weekly manual check using the steps above is more reliable than waiting for an alert that might not arrive.

Related reading: best blogging niches 2026.

For the adjacent case, read How to Begin Your Gaming Blog.

Related reading: how to find tiktok drafts.

If you want the wider picture, see seeing everything you have liked on X.

Worth a read: How Many TikTok Accounts Can You Run At Once (And Where It Falls Apart).

I've explained why TikTok likes disappear and what's usually behind the drop.

Frequently asked questions

Can you sort TikTok search results by number of likes?

Yes. Search your keyword, tap "Filters" above the results, and choose "Most liked" under "Sort by." You can also narrow it by date range, which is useful for finding what's currently trending versus what's an old evergreen hit.

Is there a way to see the top TikTok videos in an entire industry, not just one keyword?

Use TikTok Creative Center's trending section, which lets you filter by broad industry categories like beauty, food and beverage, or gaming and sort by likes, shares, or comments across a set time period, without needing an exact keyword match.

Why does the "top liked" video in my niche sometimes belong to an account with almost no other content in that space?

Repost and aggregator accounts frequently lift high-performing videos from smaller original creators and repost them to a larger existing following, where they rack up likes the original creator never sees. Always check the caption and comments for signs the account regularly credits or reposts other people's content before treating it as an original example to study.

Does the most-liked video in a niche mean it's the best one to copy?

Not necessarily. Likes measure attention, not conversion. A video with far fewer likes but a clear call to action and relevant audience often generates more enquiries or sales than the top-liked video, so study the top video for hooks and pacing but measure your own attempts against leads or sales, not like count.

Further reading

• TikTok's Business Help Centre