From the archive. First published in May 2017. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In 2017 Facebook announced it would reduce the reach of posts linking to low quality web experiences: pages heavy with advertising, thin on content, or designed mainly to harvest clicks. Facebook’s stated reasoning was that people had told it they disliked misleading, sensational and spammy stories.
For anyone whose business was sending Facebook traffic to ad heavy pages, this was the beginning of the end.
What the campaign became
This was not a one off. It became a continuous programme that has shaped Facebook distribution ever since.
- 2017. Low quality landing pages demoted. Engagement bait classified and demoted, with stricter page level penalties for repeat use.
- 2018. The meaningful interactions update reduced public content from pages and publishers generally.
- 2025. Accounts using long, distracting captions or excessive hashtags restricted to their followers only, which removes recommendation eligibility entirely.
- 2025 to 2026. Unoriginal content policies reduced distribution across everything an account posts if it repeatedly reuses other people’s material.
Where it ended up
Links are now the worst performing format on Facebook by a wide margin, at roughly a 0.20 percent reach rate against 1.20 percent for images. Meta’s own reporting shows the overwhelming majority of feed views contain no external link at all. And from December 2025 Meta began testing a cap of two link posts per month for accounts without a Meta Verified subscription.
So the trajectory that started as a quality campaign has arrived somewhere simpler: Facebook is not a traffic channel any more, and the remaining link distribution is being moved behind a subscription.
What to do
Build attention on Facebook and convert it somewhere you own. The practical detail is in our guide to organic reach, including which widely repeated workarounds have no evidence behind them.
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