Objective: To summarize the global research hotspots and trends of family intervention on autism spectrum disorder (ASD), to provide ideas for the development of localized research on family intervention for ASD in China. Methods: This study used the bibliometric software CiteSpace to conduct visual analysis on emerging cutting edge documents in the Web of Science core database in the field of family intervention for autism in the past 20 years (2001-2020). Data collection used 7 subject terms related to family caregiver intervention in February 2021. A total of 2 342 literature was obtained after data sorting. Results: The number of international publications has risen rapidly since 2013. The average annual number of international publications was 29 during 2001- 2012, then 250 during 2013-2020, which increased by 8 times. Among them, the United States ranked the top of publication with 1 295 articles, while publications from two universities in Canada and the United Kingdom showed higher impacts. The high frequency keywords that reflected the international hotspots included children, adolescent, mother, behavior, and stress; the high centrality keywords included follow up, intellectual disability, early recognition, young children and language. Conclusion The research hotspots in the field of ASD family intervention in the past 20 years included targets, strategies and forms, as well as the implementation effects of ASD family interventions. The trends of research in the past five years (2016-2020) mainly focus on the intervention studies of children, adolescents and adults with ASD and the randomized controlled trials of ASD family intervention focusing on caregivers.