Brands and agencies buying reach through Weibo's verified creators now face scoring that rewards originality and retention, with third-quarter user numbers the first test of the redesign.
Weibo is rewriting what its recommendation feed rewards. At the 2026 Weibo V Influence Conference (微博V影响力大会) in Beijing on October 17, Huang Fan, the platform’s senior director of recommendation algorithms, said Weibo will push traffic toward real-person creators who contribute original material and squeeze the reach of look-alike marketing accounts. "Interaction volume itself is no longer our core goal," he said, as quoted by Jiemian. Weibo is also testing an AI editor-in-chief agent (AI总编Agent) internally, alongside a hot-trend list (热点趋势榜) and an angle-scarcity analysis tool (切面稀缺度分析) meant to show creators which facts, expert explanations and viewpoints a breaking story still lacks.
The reset comes as the audience thins. Weibo reported 598 million monthly active users in December 2023, 567 million in December 2025 and 561 million in June 2026. Those figures come from its own fourth-quarter 2023 results, its fourth-quarter 2025 results and its second-quarter 2026 results. Daily active users were 254 million in June.
The conference gave no launch date for the AI editor tool and no data on how many creators can use it. What it did lay out is a new set of scoring rules, which matter to the brands and agencies that buy reach through Weibo’s verified creators.
Weibo is paying for originality with traffic and cash
The main new instrument is a creative vitality score (创作活力分) for Gold V and Orange V accounts, Weibo’s tiers of verified influencers. According to Jiemian, the score rates content production and active interaction, looking at originality, opinions, personal sharing and genuine exchange. Gold and Orange V accounts that score 70 points or more may receive extra exposure and support.
Weibo is also introducing a measure it calls 留量, roughly "retained attention": whether a user who has just read a post wants to keep following its author. Huang described inflated metrics as the opposite of what the new measure tracks. Repeated identical comments and mutual liking can make numbers look busy, he said, without showing that the content has value.
Video gets money as well as reach. Jiemian reported that Weibo plans to incubate more than 200 curated IP columns, bring in over 20,000 short dramas and tilt its 70% cash revenue-share incentive toward selected creators. Huanqiu reported that one creator program, called 续航 (Xùháng), carries a dedicated budget of RMB30 million. Yang Fan, senior director of video operations, said the number of weekly active video creators grew 35%, according to Huanqiu.
Early metrics favor real accounts, though sources split on reposts
Weibo says the shift is already visible in its feed. Exposure for content from real-person accounts rose 45% compared with six months earlier, a figure Jiemian, Huanqiu and a CNR piece labeled as commercial content all report. On reposts the accounts diverge. Jiemian says the share of recommendation-feed exposure going to reposted content rose twofold year on year, while Huanqiu and CNR put the year-on-year increase at 21.3%.
Hot search, Weibo’s trending list, is being restructured too. Jiemian reported that landing pages now gather authoritative reports and posts by the people involved on a "first floor," with general discussion below, and that AI is used to sort posts into reporting, opinion or low-quality filler. Zhou Zihui, senior director of hot-topic operations, said hot-search terms tied to authoritative statements rose 21% compared with the same period of 2025, and those tied to opinion discussion rose 10%, according to Huanqiu.
The reasons for the user decline matter for judging whether these changes can reverse it. Jiemian cited chief executive Wang Gaofei’s explanation on the second-quarter earnings call: Weibo moved channel spending from acquiring users toward converting new ones, and the home feed’s redesign from a follow-based timeline to recommendations is still being tuned. Weibo will keep running the recommendation feed alongside the social-relationship feed, Jiemian reported.
Third-quarter results will show whether the redesign holds users
The first hard evidence will be Weibo’s third-quarter results, which will report September user numbers against June’s 561 million. Huanqiu cited 139,000 Gold and Orange V creators at the end of the third quarter, up 11.3% year on year, which suggests the supply side is growing even as the audience contracts.
Wang said in the second-quarter release that Weibo had made progress integrating AI into its product, content and monetization systems. The AI editor agent is the clearest creator-facing version of that so far. A move from internal testing to general availability for Gold and Orange V accounts, with terms on who can use it, is the next concrete step to look for.