In October 2025 Elon Musk said X would remove its hand-built ranking rules and let Grok read every post and watch every video to decide what people see. By the end of 2025 even the Following tab was ranked by Grok by default, with a chronological view still available. In 2026 X published its ranking code twice, which makes the algorithm more transparent than it has ever been, and claims about it easier to check.
What the published code shows
The January 2026 release, under an open licence, showed a transformer model ported from Grok-1 that predicts how each person will react to each post, positively and negatively, with adjustments for author diversity and for accounts the person does not follow. The weights were not included. A larger release in August, announced by X's product vice president Keith Coleman, included them, though X withheld the Grok models that predict rule violations.
Business Insider's analysis of that code found these approximate weights:
- Sharing a post or copying its link: about 20.
- A reply, a quote, or a share by direct message: about 5 each.
- A follow: about 4.
- A repost: about 1.
- A like: 0.5.
- A report: minus 234. A mute: minus 59. Not interested: minus 43. A block: minus 31.
Those are analysts' readings of the code, not figures X has stated. The pattern is still clear: a post people share and talk about is worth far more than one they like, and a post that makes people mute or report the author is punished heavily.
Links
For years marketers believed X buried posts with links. In July 2026 Nikita Bier, then X's head of product, said links no longer need to go in replies, and Musk said X had not penalised links for over a year. The published code has no explicit penalty for links. Independent data tells a different story: Buffer's analysis of 18.8 million posts found that link posts from accounts without Premium had a median engagement of about zero after March 2025, and a Nieman Lab analysis of news publishers in April 2026 found links hurt engagement. Bier's own explanation, in 2025, was that people do not react to link posts because the browser covers the post.
The practical answer: a link post that people read and react to in X will do fine; one that only sends people away will not. Give the post value on its own, and test both ways.
Other changes that affect reach
- Since about May 2026, accounts without Premium can post 50 times and reply 200 times a day, down from 2,400.
- In July X added a mutual-follower signal to replies and the For You feed.
- Grok-curated custom timelines on more than 75 topics are in early access for Premium on iPhone.
- Grok has translated posts automatically, worldwide, since April 2026.
- Under the Hood, a pilot tool, lets accounts over a year old with at least ten posts in the past month download the labels applied to them. Since 19 September it also shows posts withheld because of a government or legal demand, and names the country.
The last change matters in the Gulf: brands and agencies can now see whether a post was withheld in a particular country, and why.
Myths to drop
- That link posts get zero reach, or 94 percent fewer views. The 94 percent figure comes from a vendor's blog, not X.
- That Premium boosts reach ten times. Ten times comes from Buffer's observations; the code includes subscription status as an input, without a stated weight.
- That X banned hashtags and emoji in ads in 2026. Those ad quality rules date from mid 2025.
What to do for brand and founder accounts
- Write posts people want to share by message or quote: useful, specific, sometimes provocative within the brand's limits.
- Reply to people who reply. Replies carry far more weight than likes.
- Avoid anything that invites reports or mutes: engagement bait, repetition, off-topic promotion.
- Test link posts against posts with the link in a reply, and judge by the client's analytics, not impressions alone.
- Use Premium or Premium Business for accounts that post often, given the new posting limits.
The caption and hashtag checker on this site counts characters the way X does, with every link counted as 23, and the best time to post tool shows when Gulf audiences are most active.
