Tony Wang16 min read17,774 TikTok 'Where Did You Get That?' Comments: Who Gets an Answer
Creators answer TikTok buyer questions twice as often as other comments, yet 63% of videos leave every buyer unanswered. Data from 916K comments.
Under almost every TikTok video that shows a product, someone asks "link?". We counted those questions across 12 product categories and checked who got an answer. The short version: creators are not ignoring buyers. They answer buyer questions more often than anything else in their comments. The problem is that one answer does not travel. Buyers keep asking the same question underneath an answer they never see, and buyers writing in Spanish or Portuguese under English-language videos are left almost entirely alone.
What counts as a buyer question
A buyer question is a top-level audience comment that asks where to get an item, what it is called, or what it costs: "link?", "where did you get that rack?", "how much", "name of the app?", "¿dónde lo compro?", "¿cuánto cuesta?", "qual o nome?". We matched these with one multilingual pattern and then tried to break it:
- Read a random sample. 40 of 40 randomly drawn matches expressed product-sourcing or price intent.
- Compared it with TikTok's own label. TikTok's comment API marks some comments as high purchase intent. That label is set on 83% of our matches.
- Removed a confound. 92 videos use a "comment LINK" caption that triggers an automated DM, so a public reply rate means nothing there. Their 428 buyer questions are excluded from every rate below.
- Tightened the pattern. Dropping the loosest phrase ("what kind of…") removed 642 matches and moved no headline rate by more than 0.4 percentage points.
Creators do answer buyers, more than anything else
Buyer questions are the comments creators are most likely to answer. They beat other questions and ordinary comments by a wide margin:
| Top-level audience comment | Comments | Got a public creator reply | Liked by the creator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buyer question (where / name / price) | 16,945 | 20.3% | 17.1% |
| Other question | 96,824 | 17.8% | 15.1% |
| Not a question | 636,934 | 8.6% | 17.4% |
Counts in this table cover comments with full raw engagement data (97% of the corpus) and exclude texts of three characters or fewer. The comparison holds on the same video too: across 4,800 videos that drew both buyer questions and ordinary comments, creators answered 26.1% of buyer questions and 16.1% of ordinary comments on average. When they answer, they are quick. The median answer arrived 3 hours after the question, and 85% arrived within a day.
Buffer's large study of comment replies found that replying lifts a post's engagement by 5% to 42% depending on the platform, but it covered Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X and Bluesky, not TikTok. We found no published benchmark for how often TikTok creators answer comments, so these rates stand on their own.
But most buyers still hear nothing
A 20% answer rate still means four in five buyer questions go publicly unanswered. The gaps are concentrated:
- On 63% of videos that had both buyer questions and ordinary comments, not one buyer question got a public answer.
- 41% of all buyer questions sit on videos that drew 10 or more of them. The busiest video in the corpus collected 201.
- 1,111 buyer questions were liked by the creator but have no stored creator reply: seen, acknowledged, not answered in public.
The rate varies by category, but no category gets past about a third:
| Category | Buyer questions | Videos | Answered (all questions) | Answered (average per video) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kitchen gadgets | 2,600 | 539 | 18.7% | 23.3% |
| Clothing storage | 1,995 | 525 | 24.8% | 25.8% |
| Gaming accessories | 1,918 | 594 | 18.6% | 26.2% |
| Cleaning tools | 1,720 | 366 | 15.9% | 22.9% |
| Pet products | 1,667 | 443 | 18.4% | 26.5% |
| Hair styling tools | 1,587 | 428 | 12.9% | 21.9% |
| Craft tools | 1,438 | 463 | 28.4% | 33.8% |
| Travel accessories | 1,393 | 415 | 22.6% | 30.5% |
| Coffee equipment | 1,212 | 400 | 23.3% | 31.4% |
| Home workout equipment | 1,138 | 326 | 20.7% | 22.8% |
| Productivity apps | 560 | 250 | 20.2% | 25.0% |
| Wireless earbuds | 546 | 184 | 21.8% | 23.5% |
The per-video average is higher than the pooled rate in every category, which means the videos drawing the most buyer questions tend to answer a smaller share of them. Hair styling tools show the widest gap: 12.9% of all its buyer questions were answered, while the average hair video answered 21.9%.
The answer gets buried
Here is the pattern that matters most for anyone selling through TikTok. On the 1,795 videos where a creator publicly answered at least one buyer question, those videos went on to collect 7,688 buyer questions in total, and 63% of them were posted after the first answer already existed. The buyer who asks at minute five gets "link in bio". The next hundred ask again, because a reply nested under someone else's comment is easy to miss.
When creators do answer, the answer usually sends buyers somewhere else. Across 3,597 retrieved creator answers to buyer questions, keyword matches show where they point (an answer can match more than one):
| Answer mentions | Answers |
|---|---|
| Bio, profile, storefront or LTK link | 617 |
| Amazon | 559 |
| Another named retailer (Target, Walmart, IKEA, Temu, Etsy…) | 282 |
| A DM or 'sent you a message' | 156 |
| TikTok Shop, cart or basket | 98 |
| A price | 88 |
| Handmade, vintage, or no link available | 74 |
We also looked for pinned comments, the obvious fix for a buried answer. TikTok's comment data flags pinned comments, but only 19 of 970,789 retrieved comments carry that flag. That is too few to tell whether creators rarely pin or the flag is rarely returned, so we make no claim either way.
Buyers keep coming after creators leave
Most TikTok comments arrive fast. A study that collected every TikTok post from one hour in April 2024 found the most common gap between a post and a comment is just under a day, and commenting drops off sharply two to three months after posting. Buyer questions do not follow that curve.
For timing we use a stricter subset: 8,318 videos whose comment pagination finished normally and that were at least 90 days old when we collected them. They carry 7,505 buyer questions and 27,591 praise comments ("love this", "genius", "need this"). Among comments posted within a year of the video, this is how much of each had arrived by a given day:
| Comment type | By day 1 | By day 7 | By day 30 | By day 90 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buyer questions | 13.6% | 36.2% | 56.9% | 84.3% |
| Praise | 25.8% | 52.5% | 72.1% | 93.1% |
Across all of them, the median buyer question arrived 23 days after the video was posted, against 6 days for praise. 46% of buyer questions came after day 30 and 20% after day 90. The gap is not an artifact of which videos we counted:
- First 90 days only: buyer questions still arrive later, a median of 12.3 days against 4.1 for praise.
- Same video: on 752 videos with at least two of each, buyer questions came later than praise on 61% of them.
- Every video age: praise lands around day 6 whether a video is four months or three years old. The buyer-question median ranges from 15 to 53 days.
Over a video's life, the comment section turns more commercial. Buyer questions are 1.9% of comments on the first day and 3.8% between days 91 and 365, while praise falls from 13.3% to 6.3%.
Late buyers get half the answers
The later a buyer asks, the less likely anyone answers:
| Asked | Buyer questions | Answered by the creator | Any reply at all |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0-1 | 971 | 30.4% | 67.9% |
| Days 2-7 | 1,620 | 22.8% | 45.4% |
| Days 8-30 | 1,487 | 20.4% | 38.8% |
| Days 31-90 | 1,963 | 15.8% | 30.2% |
| After day 90 | 1,464 | 14.3% | 27.2% |
"Any reply" comes from TikTok's own reply count and includes other viewers. The drop holds within the same video: on 538 videos with buyer questions both in the first week and after day 30, creators answered an average of 32.0% of the early ones and 15.7% of the late ones.
The main reason is not that creators skip late buyers. It is that creators have moved on:
- On 51.5% of the 1,554 videos that drew a buyer question after day 30, the creator posted no comment at all after day 30. On 28.0% the creator never commented on the video.
- Late buyers are not singled out. Buyer questions asked after day 30 were answered 15.2% of the time, and other late questions 15.5%.
- Late buyers arrive one at a time. 58% of late buyer questions landed in a week when the video drew three or fewer other audience comments; only 10% arrived during a burst of 20 or more. There is rarely a flurry of activity to bring a creator back.
- When creators do answer late, they are still quick: a median of about 4 to 5 hours after the question.
Late buyers also hit more dead ends. Questions like "still available?", "can't find it on Amazon" or "the link doesn't work" are 0.34% of questions in a video's first week (64 questions) and 1.07% after day 90 (99 questions). The counts are small, so read that as a direction, not a rate.
How long the tail runs depends on the product. Wireless earbuds (58.9%) and home workout equipment (58.4%) collect most of their buyer questions after day 30, while hair styling tools (37.8%) and cleaning tools (35.2%) collect most of theirs earlier.
Two checks against sampling bias: of videos at least a year old, only 16% got any comment in the month before we collected them, so the sample is not made up of videos that happen to still be busy. And how high a video ranked in TikTok search made no difference; between 43% and 47% of buyer questions came after day 30 in every rank band.
Buyers asking in Spanish or Portuguese get left out
Spanish- and Portuguese-language comments make up 7.1% of the audience comments in this corpus, but 21.4% of the buyer questions, about three times their share. Where those buyers land decides whether anyone answers:
| Buyer question | Questions | Got a public creator reply |
|---|---|---|
| English, under an English-language video | 12,554 | 22.5% |
| Spanish or Portuguese, under a Spanish- or Portuguese-language video | 2,479 | 15.5% |
| Spanish or Portuguese, under an English-language video | 1,289 | 6.0% |
A video's language here is the most common labelled language among its audience comments. The gap is not only about language. A separate set of 1,177 comments asks whether a product ships to, or is sold in, the commenter's country ("¿envíos a Perú?", "do you ship to South Africa?", "not available in UK?"), and many of those buyers are outside the market the creator sells to. Either way, a creator selling in English is publicly answering about one in seventeen Spanish- or Portuguese-language buyers.
Bigger videos, fewer answers
The more a video is played, the less likely any buyer is to get an answer:
| Video plays | Buyer questions | Buyer questions answered | All comments answered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 100K | 3,405 | 36.5% | 24.4% |
| 100K to 1M | 7,607 | 22.1% | 12.5% |
| 1M to 10M | 5,763 | 11.2% | 4.7% |
| Over 10M | 996 | 2.8% | 1.6% |
Answer rates fall for every kind of comment as reach grows, which is what you would expect when a creator's comment section outgrows their time. Buyer questions stay ahead of ordinary comments at every level, but on a video past 10 million plays a buyer has roughly a 1-in-36 chance of a public answer.
Small tests worth running
None of this proves what would raise sales. It does point at cheap experiments a creator or brand could measure themselves:
- Put the product name, or the exact search term, in the caption or first pinned comment, then compare how many repeat buyer questions the video collects against a similar video without it.
- When a video starts drawing buyer questions, pin the first answer instead of replying under a single comment.
- Reply to Spanish- and Portuguese-language buyers in their language, or state where you ship, and track whether availability questions drop.
- On videos that break past a million plays, check the comment section for buyer questions a day later; that is where the answer rate collapses.
- Revisit the comments on product videos that are 30 to 90 days old. Nearly half of buyer questions arrive after day 30, and on half of the videos that draw them, the creator never comments again.
- If TikTok's Q&A feature is available on your account, turn it on. It labels questions in the comments and collects answers on a Q&A page, so an answer stays findable after the first week.
How we measured this, and what it cannot tell you
Collection. Videos came from Crawlora's TikTok search endpoint across 30 neutral queries per category, with at most four videos per creator per category. Comments came from Crawlora's TikTok comments endpoint, up to 150 pages per video. We verified the stored comments against a stratified sample of 133 raw API responses; all 896 comments in them matched on text, language and timestamp.
Answers. A buyer question counts as answered when a retrieved reply to it came from the video's creator. Reply threads are not fully retrieved: 2,680 buyer questions show replies in TikTok's own count that we did not store. Restricted to the 13,036 buyer questions whose reply threads were stored completely, the answer rate is 17.9%. If every missing reply had been from the creator, the overall rate could be as high as 36.8%. The true figure lies between those bounds, and the 20.3% headline sits near the lower one.
What this data cannot see. Search results in this corpus carried no TikTok Shop product anchors, so we cannot tell which videos had a shopping link attached, or what was in a creator's bio. Answers may also arrive by DM or in a follow-up video. Nothing here measures clicks, sales or conversion.
Timing. The timing section uses only videos whose comment pagination finished cleanly and that were at least 90 days old at collection, excluding "comment LINK" videos. "Days after posting" is the comment's timestamp minus the video's. Deleted comments and videos are invisible to us. The data shows when buyers ask, not how they found the video.
What it is not. The videos are what TikTok search returned for 12 product categories, not a random sample of TikTok. Rates describe this corpus, not the platform as a whole, and comment timestamps skew recent because the collection ran in September 2026.
Get the data
The full corpus behind this post is available as two Parquet files: 17,730 videos and 999,930 comments and inline replies, with like and reply counts. Download it from Hugging Face, Kaggle or Zenodo, which gives it a permanent DOI for citation: 10.5281/zenodo.22743607.
Before release we removed every commenter identifier, replaced @mentions in comment text with @user, and masked email addresses and phone numbers. Comment text and captions remain the property of their authors and are subject to TikTok's terms. The dataset is for research and analysis, not for identifying or contacting commenters. If you wrote a comment in it and want it removed, contact us with the video and comment ID.
Pull the comments under your own product videos
Crawlora's TikTok comments endpoint returns every top-level comment and inline reply with timestamps, language labels and cursor pagination, so you can find unanswered buyer questions yourself.
Related reading
Frequently asked questions
How often do TikTok creators answer 'where did you get that?' comments?
In our corpus of 916,482 audience comments on 17,730 TikTok product videos, creators publicly answered 20.3% of buyer questions (where to buy, what it is called, or what it costs). Because some reply threads were not fully retrieved, the true rate lies between about 18% and 37%. Videos using an automated 'comment LINK' DM caption were excluded.
Do TikTok creators ignore buyer questions?
No. Buyer questions are the comments creators answer most: 20.3%, versus 17.8% for other questions and 8.6% for ordinary comments. On the same video it is 26% versus 16%. But on 63% of videos with both kinds of comment, no buyer question got a public answer, and 63% of buyer questions on answered videos arrived after an answer already existed.
Are Spanish-speaking TikTok buyers answered less?
In this corpus, yes. Spanish- and Portuguese-language comments are 7.1% of audience comments but 21.4% of buyer questions. Under English-language videos, those buyer questions got a public creator answer 6.0% of the time, against 22.5% for English-language buyer questions. Under Spanish- or Portuguese-language videos the rate was 15.5%.
Does video reach change whether buyers get an answer?
Sharply. Buyer questions were answered 36.5% of the time on videos under 100,000 plays, 22.1% at 100,000 to 1 million, 11.2% at 1 to 10 million, and 2.8% above 10 million. Answer rates for all comments fall the same way, but buyer questions stay ahead at every level.
When do TikTok buyers ask where to buy a product?
Later than most comments. On 8,318 TikTok product videos at least 90 days old, the median buyer question arrived 23 days after posting, against 6 days for praise; 46% came after day 30 and 20% after day 90. Late buyers are answered less: 30.4% of questions asked on day one got a creator reply, against 14.3% after day 90. One reason: on about half of the videos that drew a question after day 30, the creator posted no comments at all after the first month.