What Meta Andromeda means for the ads you run

If you run your own Meta ads, you have been told this year that the algorithm changed and that you now need many more ads. Half of that is true.

The change is real and it has a name, Andromeda. The many more ads are the half that is off. Meta asks for creative diversity, which means ads that are different from each other, and it has said so in plain words.

What Andromeda is

Andromeda is the part of Meta's ad delivery that decides which ads are considered for a person at all. Meta's engineers described it in December 2024 as the first stage, called retrieval: it takes tens of millions of candidate ads and cuts them to a few thousand before anything is ranked.

Everything you know as the auction happens after that cut. An ad that is not picked for a person at this stage is never ranked for them, whatever you bid.

Meta also said why it rebuilt this stage. It expects the number of ads it has to choose from to grow a great deal, because its own automation makes more ads eligible to be shown and because AI tools let every advertiser make more of them.

What Meta asks for in creative diversity

Meta calls the practice creative diversification, and Meta for Business defines it in one line: a wide range of ads with different themes, messages and visuals.

Meta's guidance for advertisers, published in November 2024, comes down to three habits. Launch new ads every week. Read which ones worked and write the next brief from that. Then make the next round for different kinds of buyer, with creators and AI tools doing some of the making.

It gives one number. For Advantage+ shopping campaigns, Meta recommends keeping at least 20 diversified ads live and putting 20 to 30 per cent of the budget into testing new ones.

Twenty versions of one ad with the headline swapped are not twenty diversified ads.

Why near copies do not count

Meta's page for small businesses says what happens to them. When ads are too similar, Meta may not recognise them as different, and it can deliver them to the same people.

That overlap limits how many people you reach. Meta says it ends in a Creative limited or Creative fatigue status, which you can see in the Delivery column in Ads Manager.

So test a new ad by asking whether a stranger would call it a different ad: a different reason to buy, a different picture, a different format. A new file proves nothing.

What Meta has not said

A lot of what is written about Andromeda goes further than Meta does. You will read that two ads count as one above a set percentage of similarity. One article puts the line at about 60 per cent and names no Meta page for it. Meta's own pages give no percentage.

Asked by Marketing Brew in September 2026, a Meta spokesperson called diversifying a longstanding best practice and said the company does not go into how its ranking treats an individual ad. Meta describes its own guidance as being about outcomes, not about how the machinery works.

Do not rebuild an account around a rule somebody inferred. The published advice is plain: make ads that differ, test them, and let delivery sort them.

What to do on a small budget

Twenty ads is a recommendation for one campaign type, and the examples on Meta's page are companies like Lenovo and Unilever. Meta gives no smaller number for a small account, so what follows is judgment and not policy.

The principle scales down better than the number does. A small daily budget spread across twenty ads gives each one too little delivery to tell you much. Four or five ads that each make a different case give Meta more to choose from than fifteen that make the same one.

Start from reasons to buy, not from designs. Say you sell candles. One ad is about the scent, one is about how long it burns, one is a gift, one is the room it sits in. Those are four ads. One photo with four captions is one.

Then vary the form: a still, a short video, a carousel. Meta's page for small businesses lists shapes to try, among them a product demo, a question and answer, and a point of view shot.

Replace on a rhythm too. Meta's advice is weekly. If that is out of reach, pick a pace you can keep, and watch the Delivery column for the two statuses above.

Where this advice stops

More ads that differ will not rescue an offer nobody wants or a product page that does not sell. Andromeda decides which of your ads is shown to whom. It changes nothing about what happens after the click.

It is also no reason to retire an ad that works. If one has run for months and still earns its place, leave it running and add around it.

And ask whose number it is whenever you read one about Andromeda. Meta's own figures describe its delivery as a whole, such as an 8 per cent improvement in ad quality on the segments it measured. They say nothing about what one account should expect.

Coming up with the next ad

Meta's advice is easy to understand. The hard part is finding a different reason to buy every week, and then making the ad.

Nomi does that part. Ask it for a campaign and it reads your brand and the ads already running in your market, comes back with the plan before the pictures, and then makes the ads inside your own brand rules. The set you launch starts from different reasons to buy, not from one picture with new captions.