Instagram grades your account monthly now, not per post

Instagram now judges your account over a calendar month rather than one post at a time. On 30 April 2026 it extended the originality system built for Reels in 2024 to cover photos and carousels. If most of what an account publishes in a month is someone else's work, the account gets classed as an aggregator and loses access to recommendation surfaces.

That word monthly is the part worth stopping on. Every reposting rule before this one worked at the post level, which meant a weak post cost you that post. Now a weak month costs you the month.

What you actually lose

Recommendation surfaces means Explore, suggested posts, and the reels and posts served to people who do not follow you. Your follower feed is not affected. People who already follow you keep seeing your posts in the normal way.

So the penalty is precisely aimed at growth. If your Instagram exists to service an audience you already have, this barely touches you. If Instagram is a customer acquisition channel and you depend on non-followers finding you, an aggregator classification quietly removes the thing you are paying for.

Nobody gets an email about it. You find out by watching non-follower reach fall while everything else holds.

The credit line does not help

Instagram put this in writing: crediting the original creator or adding superficial edits will not meet the threshold. That kills two habits at once.

The first is the tidy repost with a via credit in the caption. Attribution is good manners and it protects you legally. It does nothing for classification.

The second is the light touch edit. Adding a border, a caption bar, a colour wash or your logo to somebody else's video is not transformation. The system is looking at the underlying asset, not the frame you put around it.

Who this catches

Four business types are exposed and most of them do not think of themselves as reposters.

Brands led by customer content, where the plan is largely customer videos regrammed to the main account. Ambassador and partner programmes, where a dozen creators produce and the brand account collects. Franchise, dealer and reseller networks, where head office sends assets down and every location publishes the same file. And industry news accounts, where the whole editorial model is curation.

The dealer network case is the ugliest, because head office is doing the right thing by supplying good assets and every location is doing the right thing by using them. The system still reads it as one original and forty copies.

Rebuild the month, not the post

The practical shift is in planning. Stop asking whether a single post is original enough and start asking what the ratio looks like across thirty days.

Here is a workable sequence.

1. 1.Export last month's grid. Every photo, carousel and reel, in one list.
2. 2.Tag each one as original, transformed or repost. Original means your camera, your design, your edit. Transformed means someone else's raw material rebuilt into something with your commentary, your framing, your voice doing real work. Repost means their asset, your account.
3. 3.Count the reposts as a share of the month. If it is more than half, you have a structural problem, not a content problem.
4. 4.Convert reposts into transformations. A customer video becomes a reel where your technician explains what went wrong on that job. Ten dealer photos become one carousel with your own layout and your own numbers on each frame.
5. 5.Set a floor for original output per month and treat it as a production commitment, not an aspiration.

The last step is where this gets expensive and honest. Clearing the bar means shooting more. There is no editing trick that substitutes for it.

What is not published, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise

Instagram has said most. It has not published a percentage, a score, a threshold or a dashboard where you can check your standing. Anyone quoting you a specific number, sixty percent, seventy percent, any figure at all, is making it up or repeating someone who did.

Treat the ratio as directional. Aim well clear of half rather than trying to sit just under a line nobody can see.

The reporting change that goes with it

Split your reach reporting into followers and non-followers, and chart the non-follower line by month. That single chart is your early warning system. Recommendation suppression shows up there first, weeks before it shows up in leads or enquiries, and it is invisible in a total reach number.

If that line is already falling and your original share is low, you have your explanation and your fix in the same chart.

Curation was a content strategy for a long time. It is now a distribution cost, and the bill arrives once a month.