With the excessive use of traditional fossil fuels, environmental problems caused by greenhouse gases have become the focus of global attention. Compared with traditional non-renewable resources, solar energy has the advantages of clean environmental protection, wide distribution, and renewable. Earth receives about four orders of magnitude more solar energy per year than current human energy consumption. The efficient use of these solar energies to improve the environment and delay the arrival of the energy crisis is a research hotspot. Photocatalysis is an effective way to convert low-density solar energy into high-density chemical energy. Such as water splitting reaction and carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR). Additionally, organic dyes can be degraded through photocatalysis. This is an ideal environmental pollution control and clean energy production technology due to mild reaction conditions, green and low-carbon products. If these reactions can achieve scale production, it can largely alleviate the energy crisis and environmental pollution. The photocatalytic reaction is a chemical reaction caused by the light absorption of the photocatalyst. Structural stability, catalytic activity and reaction selectivity are important indicators for the investigation of a photocatalyst. Polyoxometalates (POMs) are metal oxygen clusters formed by connecting some high oxidation valence early transition metals with oxygen atoms. POMs have been widely used in catalysis, medicine and energy due to their high activity and excellent redox ability. In recent years, researchers have further improved the photocatalytic performance of polyoxometalate-based (POM-based) materials through the design and regulation of POMs. On the one hand, the bandgap of POMs can be tuned by changing the type of heteroatoms and metal atoms. On the other hand, POMs loaded on titanium dioxide (TiO2), zeolite, activated charcoal, and other matrix materials achieve synergistic effects between various materials and ultimately enhance the photocatalytic activity of POM-based materials. At present, POM-based materials have been widely used in photocatalytic degradation of pollutants, clean energy conversion and storage, and solar cells. So far, some studies have systematically reviewed the application of POM-based photocatalysts. However, the visualization of the overall knowledge structure in this field isn't considered, and many research results are not effectively combed. In this work, we used bibliometrics and data mining to systematically analyse the scientific publications in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) database. In this review, the evolution of research hotspots of POM-based photocatalysts is comprehensively expounded, which helps researchers to understand research trends, track research hotspots and explore future research directions.