From the archive. First published in February 2016. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
We asked this question in 2016, after a period when reach appeared to tick upwards following years of decline. It is worth asking again in 2026, because the answer now is genuinely interesting and most coverage has not caught up.
The short answer: both, depending on what you measure
Two credible recent studies point in opposite directions.
- Socialinsider, measuring reach as a share of followers across business pages, puts the platform average at roughly 1.25 percent, with the familiar size curve from 4.35 percent for small pages down to 0.50 percent above 100,000 followers. Flat to declining.
- Metricool, analysing nearly 40 million posts across more than a million accounts, found Facebook reach up 51 percent year on year, impressions up 57 percent and interactions up 56 percent. The largest year on year gain of any platform in that study.
How both can be true
Metricool measures absolute reach. Socialinsider measures reach per follower. AI recommendation now delivers a large share of feed views to people who do not follow the page at all, which raises absolute reach without changing reach per follower. Meanwhile follower counts keep growing, which pushes the percentage down.
So the accurate statement is this: absolute organic reach on Facebook is recovering, while reach per follower continues to decline.
Why this matters for valuation
It changes what you are buying. If reach increasingly comes from recommendation rather than from the follower graph, then a page’s follower count predicts less than it ever has, and the quality and recommendability of its content predicts more.
A small page producing genuinely good video can now out-reach a much larger page posting reposted images. That was not true in 2016, and it is the single most important shift for anyone pricing a page today.
The full timeline is in our piece on how page reach was throttled.
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