The X algorithm was updated and shared with us this week.

2 days ago, Elon pushed the latest X algorithm to GitHub.

So here’s a breakdown of what matters and what to do with it this week.

→ The algorithm is no longer ranking content the way social platforms did from 2010 to 2020.

It's not optimizing for followers, recency, or even raw engagement. It's running an interest-matching model that builds a taste profile of every viewer, based on roughly their last 127 engagements, follows, mutes, dwell time, scroll behavior. It then matches your post to people whose taste pattern lines up with whoever's already engaged with you.

This one shift changes everything downstream.

Your follower count is mostly cosmetic and the only thing that matters is whether the right people engage with your post in the first 30 to 60 minutes, because those people define the taste pool the algorithm searches next.

→ Every post then runs through cheap filters (e.g. age, language, media type, keyword penalties, format penalties for spammy patterns). Then a prediction model assigns probabilities to about 20 specific actions a viewer might take. Reply, quote, repost, DM share, click, dwell, follow. Each action carries a weight. Replies, quotes, and DM shares are the heavy ones.

There are two unintuitive rules buried in there that almost nobody talks about.

1. algorithm actively penalizes your second, third, and fourth post to the same viewer the same day. One banger genuinely does beat five mid posts.

2. video clips under a certain duration don't earn the quality view bonus, so looping micro-clips quietly lose to longer watchable ones.

So for this week, here's the actual direction:

* Focus on starting conversations. Before you write anything, spend 20 minutes scanning what's trending in your space. New AI tool, new launch, new piece of drama, new data drop. Find the 2 or 3 conversations your ideal prospect is already paying attention to and write into those. The algorithm has decided what's hot before you log in and your job is to find it.

* Pick 1 banger over 5 fillers. Until your account is genuinely huge, one well-written post a day beats four mediocre ones, because the algorithm will punish the second through fourth in the same viewer's feed. Concentrate the work.

* Engineer the first line for stop power. The model penalizes fast scrolls more than almost anything else. If your first line doesn't earn the next two seconds, the score collapses before anyhuman even gets to react. Open with a specific number, a contrarian claim, or a named authority paired with a contradiction.

* Optimize for replies and quotes. Likes are the lightest weight in the model. Replies, quotes, and DM shares carry roughly 10 to 30 times the signal.

* Use the right keywords. If the conversation is about Claude 4.7, say Claude 4.7. If it's about Hormozi's launch, say Hormozi. The algorithm is matching keywords to interest profiles.

* Prime the first 30 minutes with your network. The algorithm decides who to show your post to based on who engages first. If your first ten engagements are bots or randoms, it'll push the post to bots and randoms. Tell three or four people in your space when something good goes up. That early interaction sets the entire trajectory.

* Kill anything that looks templated.

* If you're posting video, avoid anything under the quality view threshold since it gets none of the watch-time bonus. Either commit to a clip people will actually watch for 15+ seconds or stick to text and images this week.

Every algorithm change like this rewards the founders who treat their content like a product and punishes the ones treating it like a journal. Read the conversation, pick the angle, write the one post worth writing, post it when your network is active, and let the algo do the rest.

1 post, executed against the real rules, will outperform a week of content posted against the rules from 2022.

– Wiz

P.S. If you don’t have the time to put into this but still want to build a personal brand that attracts inbound and builds your authority then book a call with me & I'll walk you through how we'd build and execute this for your account.