Your WhatsApp quality rating, and what moves it

The four states

Meta publishes four values for a template. The app shows the same four on the account screen, read live from Meta rather than stored, so what you see is what Meta says at that moment.

• —Green — high quality. Little to no negative feedback from the people who received it.
• —Yellow — medium quality. Negative feedback from multiple people, or low read rates. It still sends, and it is at risk.
• —Red — low quality. The same signals, worse. Pausing or disabling is imminent.
• —Unknown — pending. A new template with too little data to rate yet. It sends normally.

What actually moves it

The rating is a measure of how recipients respond, not of how much you send. Two signals dominate: people blocking or reporting you after a message, and people not opening messages at all.

That is why volume alone never fixes a rating and never causes one to drop. A thousand messages people wanted are green. Fifty messages to a list that did not ask for them are not.

• —Blocks and reports after a template lands — the heaviest signal.
• —Low read rates, which tell Meta the message was unwanted even when nobody complained.
• —Sending to people who never opted in, which produces both of the above.
• —Category mismatch: a marketing message dressed as a utility one, which people recognise and report.

What happens at red

Rating and status are separate fields. A template can be approved and red at the same time — the rating is the warning, the status is the consequence.

If quality does not recover, Meta pauses the template, and a paused template cannot be sent until its approved status is restored. Repeated problems escalate to the account rather than the template: a block on sending template messages for one or three days, a block on all messages for five, seven or thirty, and at the far end an indefinite lock.

What Messago does, and what it does not

The app reads quality rating from Meta when you open the account screen, and shows the same green, yellow, red and unknown values Meta returns. It does not poll, store or alert on that figure, and nothing in the product will tell you your rating has changed — if you want to know, you look.

What the product does do is remove the causes. Campaign wording goes through Meta approval before anything sends, sending is paced rather than dumped, opt-outs are enforced end to end so somebody who opted out is skipped, and every recipient carries its own delivery status with Meta’s own failure reason.

• —Approved wording only — a campaign cannot send text Meta has not reviewed.
• —Opt-out enforced from Meta’s own signal through to the campaign worker.
• —Per-recipient delivery status, so a failing audience is visible rather than inferred.
• —Sending paced automatically instead of dumped at the rate limit.