What’s On/Social
How X decides who sees your posts in 2026
X's feeds are now ranked by a Grok-based model, its ranking code has been published twice this year, and it says links are no longer penalised. Here is what the code shows, where the data disagrees, and how to run a brand or founder account.
In October 2025 Elon Musk said X would drop 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. Then, in 2026, X published its ranking code twice. The algorithm is more open than it has ever been, and the many claims made about it are far easier to check.
Inside the published code
The January 2026 release, under an open licence, showed a transformer model ported from Grok-1. It predicts how each person will react to each post, positively and negatively, and adjusts for author diversity and for accounts the person does not follow. The weights were missing. A larger release in August, announced by X's product vice president Keith Coleman, included them, though X held back the Grok models that predict rule violations.
Business Insider analysed that code and 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.
These are analysts' readings of the code, not figures X has stated. The direction is still plain. A post people share and talk about is worth far more than one they merely like, and a post that makes people mute or report its author is punished hard.
The long argument about 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 disagrees. 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 that 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 workable answer: a link post that people read and respond to inside X will do fine, and one that only sends them away will not. Make the post worth something on its own, and test both ways.
Quieter changes that still move 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 more than a year old with at least ten posts in the past month download the labels applied to them. Since 19 September it has also shown posts withheld because of a government or legal demand, and named the country.
That last one matters in the Gulf. A brand, or the team running its account, can now see whether a post was withheld in a particular country, and why.
Beliefs to let go of
- That link posts get zero reach, or 94 percent fewer views. The 94 percent figure comes from a vendor's blog, not from 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.
Running a brand or founder account
- Write posts people want to pass on by message or quote: useful, specific and, within the brand's limits, sometimes provocative.
- Reply to the people who reply to you. Replies carry far more weight than likes.
- Avoid anything that invites reports or mutes, such as engagement bait, repetition or off-topic promotion.
- Test link posts against posts with the link in a reply, and judge by your own analytics, not impressions alone.
- Put accounts that post often on Premium or Premium Business, given the new posting limits.
Two habits help alongside those: count characters the way X does, with every link as 23, and post when your Gulf audience is actually online.
If you would like a clearer plan for your brand's or your founder's presence on X, talk to ALXO. We are glad to look at what you post, when you post it and what the numbers are telling you.
