If you focus as a creator on one European city, you have an advantage on Rednote (小红书). That was a hunch of ours for a long time. Since September 2026 we can back it up.
For nine European cities we analysed the five searches Chinese-speaking travellers actually make before a city trip, and read the fifty top-ranked posts per search. 2,193 posts in total. Four findings concern you directly.
1. Nobody has claimed the searches
Behind those 2,193 posts are 1,929 different authors. Ninety percent of them appear with exactly one post. The most active account in the entire survey has twelve – across nine cities and 45 searches.
There is no “Vienna account”, no “Barcelona voice” holding these search results. The positions aren’t contested, they’re empty.
That’s precisely why niche authority is still possible here. Becoming known for “Europe” is hard. Becoming known for one city is a question of persistence, not budget.
2. Guides get saved, not liked
We split the posts into two groups: those whose titles read as a recommendation list (攻略 guide, 推荐 recommendation, 必吃 must-eat, 合集 collection) – and everything else.
| posts | likes | saves | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guide titles | 428 | 153,004 | 181,095 |
| the rest | 1,765 | 1,366,407 | 556,325 |
For guides, saves run higher than likes. For every other post it’s less than half as many. A city guide on Rednote isn’t a pastime – it gets put away and opened again weeks later, on the trip.
For you that means: a guide’s success isn’t visible on the day you publish it.
3. They’re photo sets, not videos
Of the 2,193 posts, 2,081 are image posts and 112 are videos. Five percent video.
Anyone coming from Instagram or TikTok reflexively starts with Reels. On Rednote that format is the exception. What works is a series of photos with substantial text – closer to Pinterest than to TikTok.
4. Good posts last for years
Seventy-nine percent of the posts we read are from 2026. But at rank 1 of the Lisbon results sits a post from May 2022, and it’s still collecting likes. On Instagram it would be long gone; on Rednote it gets found through search.
Reach builds slowly there. In exchange, it doesn’t decay.
What your content should show
- Specific places rather than generalities: the one café, the one view, the one market. In our city surveys it is without exception the posts with names and addresses that rank high.
- Practical detail: opening hours, how to get there, best season. That’s why things get saved.
- Seasonal: cherry blossom, Christmas market, autumn leaves. Those posts get found again year after year.
- A title that makes a decision. Titles are short – median seventeen characters – and they don’t hedge. The most-read Rome post in our survey translates as: “In Rome! If you only eat at one pasta place!”
Which cities we measured
Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome and Milan. The detailed surveys are here: Munich, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Vienna.
They’re written from a business’s point of view, not a creator’s – but you can see in them which posts rank and how their titles are built. That’s the best template there is.
What you need to get right technically
However strong the format is, without a clean foundation reach goes unused. Pay attention to good localisation, a verified account in your own name and a settled payout to Germany.
We sit between Frankfurt, Vienna and Shanghai ourselves. Talk to us about your channel.
On method
Rednote search results from September 2026, five searches per city, fifty top-ranked posts per search, deduplicated. Not platform statistics – read out by us. The platform’s ranking is personalised and changes daily; these numbers describe this one survey. The Hamburg results include posts about hamburgers as food (汉堡 means both); we left them in the totals and flag it here.