The incidence and mortality rate of the primary liver cancer are very high, and its postoperative metastasis and recurrence have become important factors that affect the prognosis of patients. Clinically, the detection methods to effectively predict and prevent of the liver cancer metastasis are in urgent need. Due to their advantage of real-time and noninvasive monitoring, circulating tumor cells (CTC), as a new tumor marker, play an important role in the early diagnosis, early treatment and individualized treatment, which induce the interest of the researchers. It has been recognized in clinical due to the successful applications in breast cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer and other diseases. The latest research shows that the state of a liver cancer patient and the number of CTCs in blood are closely related. However, the diverse detection methods and their sensitivity, specificity limit their clinical applications. At present, the popular detection system mainly contains two aspects: the enrichment and identification. In recent years, new CTC detection methods appear and are used in clinical research. This article will review the related research.