Your WhatsApp quality rating turned yellow. Do this.

Quality rating is Meta's assessment of how recipients react to your messages, shown as green, yellow or red, and driven by blocks and reports rather than by anything you can see in your own dashboard. It does not directly stop you sending — but it gates your messaging tier, and a downgrade commonly precedes enforcement.

Meta describes the rating in its Business Help Centre. The practical framing that matters: yellow means recipients are already unhappy, and the cheapest moment to act is now.

What it does and does not do

Two things follow. First, yellow costs you growth before it costs you delivery — Meta's messaging limits documentation makes tier increases conditional on high-quality messaging, so a store stuck at 250 or 2,000 recipients with good volume may be stuck on quality. Second, red is where restrictions start becoming likely.

The triage, in order

1. Stop marketing sends today. Not forever — today. Every further marketing message to an unengaged list adds negative signal.
2. Find what changed in the last 7 days. A new campaign, a new list, a new template, a higher frequency. Something did.
3. Check your opt-out path works. A customer who cannot unsubscribe blocks you, and a block is the most damaging signal there is. Automatic STOP handling is under Broadcasts → Opt-outs.
4. Cut the list to recent engagers. Anyone who has not interacted in 90 days is a risk, not an opportunity.
5. Turn on a per-contact frequency cap so no one gets more than one marketing message in a window you choose.
6. Resume small. A fraction of your usual volume, to your most engaged segment, and watch for a week.

What actually moves the rating

• Blocks. The strongest negative signal.
• Reports. Worse per instance, rarer.
• Silence at scale. Large sends nobody engages with.
• Messages people did not expect — a bought list, an import from another channel, marketing to people who only consented to order updates.

What does not move it: sending a lot to people who reply. Volume is not the problem; unwanted volume is. A store sending thousands of order updates that customers welcome stays green.

Design so it does not happen again

1. Separate consent for order updates and marketing, so someone who wants one and not the other can have that.
2. Lead flows with a question rather than a statement, so customers engage rather than merely receive.
3. Cap marketing frequency per contact deliberately, rather than discovering Meta's adaptive per-user cap the hard way.
4. Review the rating weekly. It is a lagging enough indicator that monthly is too slow.

If it goes red

Treat it as the stage before a restriction and act accordingly: stop all marketing, keep only transactional flows running, and read what to do when your account is restricted before you need it.