What is the WhatsApp quality rating?
Every WhatsApp Business number on the Cloud API gets a quality rating from Meta — it's Meta's signal of how your messages are landing with the people who receive them. The rating is based on block rate, report rate and how often customers stop responding to your messages over a rolling 7-day window. Meta computes the rating; Trinetra reads it from Meta's webhook and applies a policy based on it.
You haven't done anything special — every business that uses the Cloud API has this rating. We surface it so you can see what Meta sees, instead of finding out only after Meta has paused your broadcasts.
Green, Yellow, Red — what each means
- Green — Healthy. Your messages are being received and acted on. No restrictions.
- Yellow — Recovering. Meta has noticed
enough negative signal (blocks, reports, ignored messages) to
flag the number. Meta hasn't restricted it yet, but
continuing to send marketing at the same rate often pushes a
Yellow number to Red.
What to do: stop broadcasts for 24–72 hours; keep replying to inbound chats normally. - Red — Critical. Meta has rated the number
as low-quality. Continuing to send marketing risks Meta's
own messaging-limit downgrade, after which the number is on a
strict per-day quota until quality recovers.
What to do: stop all marketing; reply only to customers who message you first. Rating usually recovers within a few days of clean behaviour. - Not rated yet. Meta hasn't produced a rating yet — usually the first few hundred outbound messages on a new number. No restrictions during this window.
What Trinetra pauses automatically
When Meta drops your rating to Yellow or Red, Trinetra applies a throttle without waiting for you to react. The policy:
- Yellow: broadcasts are paused. Single 1:1 marketing template messages still go.
- Red: all marketing pauses — both broadcasts and single marketing templates.
The throttle change is recorded on an immutable audit log so you can see what changed and when. Throttle is a Trinetra-side gate — Meta still has the final word on whether any individual message delivers.
What still works at every rating
Customer replies (1:1 conversations within the 24-hour customer-initiated window) and transactional messages (order updates, OTPs, shipping notifications) are never gated by Trinetra at any rating. Pausing 1:1 replies would break the actual conversation thread on the customer's WhatsApp, which is worse for trust than sending a few more outbound messages on a low-rated number.
How a rating recovers
Quality typically recovers when Meta's rolling window stops weighing the negative signal. The fastest path back to Green:
- Pause everything that's not a 1:1 reply for 24–72 hours.
- Focus on conversations that customers initiated — those have the lowest negative-signal risk.
- When you do restart marketing, send to the most-engaged segments first.
Recovery is set by Meta's algorithm, not Trinetra. We are honest about that — we cannot put a guaranteed timeline on it. Numbers usually recover within a few days of clean behaviour.
Where to see your rating live
In the app, go to Settings → WhatsApp Business. The WhatsApp delivery quality card under the Connected panel shows:
- The current rating (with a colour-coded pill).
- What you can send right now in plain English.
- When Meta last updated the rating + when Trinetra last changed the throttle.
- A timeline of the most recent rating changes — each tagged with whether it came from Meta's webhook or Trinetra's reconciliation cron.
How to keep your rating high
- Get explicit opt-in before adding anyone to a broadcast list. Marketing to people who didn't ask is the fastest way to a block.
- Make “Stop” obvious. Include an unsubscribe path in marketing templates; honour it within a day.
- Don't blast. Spread broadcasts over hours, not minutes. Meta watches rate, not just volume.
- Personalise. Template messages with a recipient's name + relevant context get reported less often than generic blasts.
- Reply quickly. A number that responds fast to inbound messages signals genuine business use to Meta's algorithm.