Almost certainly not. Work through the list above first — format changes and posting-rate changes account for most drops. Platforms increasingly surface an account status page that will tell you if something is genuinely restricted.

Does deleting a poorly performing post help?

There is no good evidence for it, and you lose the data. Leave it up and compare against it.

How long should I wait before concluding something changed?

Two weeks minimum, and longer if you post less than a few times a week. Single posts vary too much to read anything into.

Your reach dropped: how to work out why

Almost nobody is shadowbanned. Work through these in order — the answer is usually in the first three.

Last reviewed 31 August 2026

Start by checking it is real

Compare a run of posts against a matching run, not one post against your best ever. Reach is extremely variable post to post, and a fortnight is the shortest window that carries any signal.

Check reach, not impressions, and check whether follower reach and non-follower reach moved differently. A drop in non-follower reach is a distribution story. A drop in follower reach is usually a content or timing story. They have completely different causes and conflating them sends you looking in the wrong place.

The order to work through

Roughly in order of how often each turns out to be the answer.

You changed format. Switching between video, stills and carousels moves reach substantially, because they are distributed through different surfaces. This is the single most common cause and the easiest to miss, because it does not feel like a change.
You changed posting rate. Going from daily to twice a week reduces total reach roughly proportionally, and people compare the new per-post number to the old total.
Seasonality. Whole categories move with the calendar, and a fall that matches last year's same fortnight is not a problem to solve.
One outlier is skewing the comparison. A single post that travelled unusually far resets your sense of normal. Compare medians rather than averages.
The mix of who you reached changed. A post that got pushed to a broad, poorly-matched audience will show high reach and terrible engagement, and the next post is distributed off the back of that response.
An actual restriction. Real, and worth checking your account status page for — but it is the last thing to conclude, not the first, and platforms increasingly tell you when something is limited.

What to do about it

Change one thing at a time and give it a fortnight. The instinct after a drop is to change format, timing, length and topic simultaneously, which guarantees you learn nothing regardless of whether reach recovers.

If the diagnosis is that a format stopped working, the fix is rarely to push harder on it. Reach usually returns through content that earns a response, not through posting more of something that did not.

Questions

Am I shadowbanned?: Almost certainly not. Work through the list above first — format changes and posting-rate changes account for most drops. Platforms increasingly surface an account status page that will tell you if something is genuinely restricted.
Does deleting a poorly performing post help?: There is no good evidence for it, and you lose the data. Leave it up and compare against it.
How long should I wait before concluding something changed?: Two weeks minimum, and longer if you post less than a few times a week. Single posts vary too much to read anything into.