Guide · 11 min read
How X picks the posts in your For You feed in 2026, what the Grok-based ranker rewards and punishes, and what that means for getting more impressions.
X's For You feed is built in three stages. It gathers candidate posts from accounts you follow and from accounts you do not, filters out what you should not see, then ranks what is left with a Grok-based model that predicts how you will react to each post. Posts you are likely to reply to, repost, read or click rise. Posts you are likely to mute, block or mark as not interesting sink.
xAI published the code for this system in January 2026 and has updated it in public since. The exact weights change between releases, so this guide sticks to the parts that hold across versions and what they mean for you.
Every time you open For You, X collects a pool of recent posts that might interest you from two places:
Out-of-network is where growth comes from. It is how a post from a small account reaches thousands of people who have never heard of it. To get there, a post first has to do well with the people who see it early, which is usually your followers and anyone reading the thread you replied in.
Before ranking, X removes posts that should not be shown. Typical filters:
The remaining posts are scored by a transformer model built on Grok. For each post, it predicts the chance that you will take each of a set of actions, then combines those chances into one score. The actions include positive ones:
And negative ones: mark as not interested, mute the author, block the author, report the post. Negative predictions pull the score down hard.
Finally, X spreads authors out, so one account cannot fill your feed even if all its posts score well. That is why a burst of ten posts in an hour does not get you ten times the reach.
Turning the mechanism into habits:
Under every post, replies are ranked too. X says replies from paid subscribers get priority, with the most on the highest tier, though it has not published by how much. Premium users can also downvote replies, choosing reasons such as spam or AI-generated, and that feedback lowers a reply's position. Replies from accounts the reader has a relationship with, such as mutuals, were reported to get a lift in mid-2026.
For anyone growing by replying, the takeaway is the same as for posts: replies that add something and start a conversation rise; generic ones sink.
Putting it all together, the habits that raise impressions in 2026:
ReplyKit's Opportunity Radar applies the same logic to replies: it scores posts in your X feed on relevance, the author's followers, freshness, momentum and how crowded the replies are, so your replies land where they will be seen.
Yes. xAI published the code of X's recommendation system in January 2026 and updates it in public. Some parts, such as the trained model weights and safety systems, are not fully reproducible from the published code.
Posts it predicts you will reply to, repost, read, click or follow the author of, from accounts you follow and from accounts that match your interests. Posts it predicts you would mute, block, report or mark as not interesting are pushed down.
X gives replies from paid subscribers priority in reply ranking, but has not published a figure. Premium does not guarantee reach for your posts; how people react to them matters more.
Usually because recent posts got less early engagement, you posted less, or you drifted off your usual topic. Less often, the account has a visibility restriction. Our guide on X shadowbans explains how to tell the difference.
Built by · One person
There is no company behind this, just one developer who reads every message. If ReplyKit does not fit how you work, a feature, a platform, a different style of reply, say so. Requests from users decide what ships next.
Prefer email? contact@replykit.eu