The Hugging Face Hub Is a Free JSON API: Rank Trending AI Models Without a Key

Everyone reads the Hugging Face trending page in a browser. Almost nobody knows the whole Hub sits behind a plain JSON API with no key, no login, and cursor pagination. If you want a weekly report of what the AI community is actually adopting, you can build it with fetch . The endpoints GET https://huggingface.co/api/models GET https://huggingface.co/api/datasets GET https://huggingface.co/api/spaces Useful parameters, same across all three: sort ranks results: trendingScore , downloads , likes , createdAt , lastModified direction=-1 for descending search matches names, author restricts to one org like meta-llama filter matches Hub tags: text-generation , license:mit , even arxiv:2606.23050 limit up to 100 per page So the top trending models right now: https://huggingface.co/api/models?sort=trendingScore&direction=-1&limit=100 trendingScore is the interesting one. Downloads and likes rank all time popularity, which is dominated by the same old models. Trending score is Hugging Face's own measure of current momentum, and it moves daily. Today it puts a four day old OCR model from Baidu at the top, which no downloads sort would surface for weeks. Slim payloads with expand By default the models endpoint returns a siblings array listing every file in the repo, which bloats a 100 item page. Ask for exactly the fields you want instead: const fields = [ ' downloads ' , ' likes ' , ' trendingScore ' , ' pipeline_tag ' , ' tags ' , ' createdAt ' ]; const params = new URLSearchParams ({ sort : ' trendingScore ' , direction : ' -1 ' , limit : ' 100 ' }); for ( const f of fields ) params . append ( ' expand[] ' , f ); const res = await fetch ( `https://huggingface.co/api/models? ${ params } ` ); const models = await res . json (); Pagination is a Link header There is no page parameter. Each response carries a Link header with a cursor for the next page, GitHub style: function nextUrl ( res ) { const m = ( res . headers . get ( ' link ' ) || '' ). match ( /< ([^ > ] + ) >; \s *r