How Instagram decides which reels you see, in Instagram’s own words

Every creator has a theory about the algorithm. Instagram published its own on May 31, 2023, in a post by Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, titled “Instagram Ranking Explained”. The post treats Feed, Stories, Explore and Reels separately, because each is ranked differently. The Reels section is the one that decides whether a video made for strangers finds them.

Four signals, in order

Mosseri lists the inputs to Reels ranking “in rough order of importance”. Quoted in full, they are:

1. “Your activity. We look at things like which reels you’ve liked, saved, reshared, commented on, and engaged with recently.”
2. “Your history of interacting with the person who posted. As with Explore, it’s likely the video was made by someone you’ve never heard of, but if you have interacted with them, that gives us a sense of how interested you might be in what they shared.”
3. “Information about the reel. These are signals about the content within the video such as the audio track or visuals in the video, as well as popularity.”
4. “Information about the person who posted. We consider popularity signals such as number of followers or level of engagement to help find compelling content from a wide array of people and give everyone a chance to find their audience.”

The order is the story. The viewer’s own recent behaviour comes first. The creator’s follower count comes last, and it is framed not as a reward for size but as a fairness mechanism, a way to “give everyone a chance to find their audience.”

The second signal contains an admission that is easy to read past: “it’s likely the video was made by someone you’ve never heard of.” Reels, in Instagram’s own description, is built to show you strangers.

What the system predicts

Having gathered those signals, the post says, Instagram makes a set of predictions about each viewer and each reel. It estimates “how likely you are to reshare a reel, watch a reel all the way through, like it, and go to the audio page.”

Four predictions, and two of them, reshares and completion, come before likes. A reel that people send to friends and watch to the end is, on this description, doing the two things the system is most interested in.

What Instagram shows less

The post is also explicit about what the platform pushes down. Instagram tries “to make certain reels less visible for other reasons, such as low-resolution or watermarked reels, reels that are muted or contain borders, reels that are majority text, or reels that have already been posted on Instagram.”

Each item on that list targets a recognisable habit. Watermarks and reposts describe video lifted from another app or another account. Muted reels and borders describe clips that were not made for the format. Majority-text reels describe screenshots and slideshows dressed as video. Taken together, the list amounts to a definition of what Instagram considers a native reel: original, full-frame, with sound.

What this looks like from the outside

The design shows up in the numbers of accounts that make native, original reels. @deni_nzt, the Instagram account profiled on this site, had about 10,600 followers on September 25, 2026, and the 17 reels it posted in the preceding ten days had been watched 10.7 million times, roughly a thousand views per follower. Those views cannot have come from followers alone. They are consistent with the system Mosseri describes, in which a reel is shown to people who have never heard of its maker and then judged on whether they watch it through and pass it on.

What the post does not say

Mosseri’s post gives no weights, no thresholds and no guarantees. It is a description of intent rather than a specification, and it is dated May 31, 2023. Readers should treat it as Instagram’s own statement of how Reels ranking was designed at that time, and the best public account there is of why the feed looks the way it does.