The short version: Threads has quietly become a real platform, sitting somewhere north of 350 million monthly users, with ads, direct messages, custom feeds and creator payouts all now live. But the news that matters most for business owners isn’t the growth number, it’s that Meta still deliberately suppresses outbound links and news content in the feed, which means Threads is brilliant for reach and nearly useless for driving traffic unless you know how to work around it.
Where Threads stands right now
I’ve been posting on Threads since the week it launched in July 2023, back when it hit 100 million signups in five days and then promptly lost most of those people within a month. That early spike was noise. What’s happened since is the actual story.
Meta’s most recent earnings calls have put Threads at over 350 million monthly active users, up from the 175 million Zuckerberg reported in April 2024 and the 275 million-plus figure from late 2024. That’s real, sustained growth in a market where most new social apps die within a year. For context, Bluesky, the app everyone said would kill Threads, sits at a fraction of that number.
The bigger platform news over the past year or so:
- Threads ads went fully global in 2025, after a slow US-only rollout, and now sit inside Meta’s Ads Manager alongside Facebook and Instagram placements, meaning if you already run Meta ads you can add Threads with one extra checkbox
- Direct messages arrived and now sync with Instagram DMs, so a message from a Threads follower lands in the same inbox as your Instagram messages
- Custom feeds (Threads’ version of Twitter Lists) rolled out in 2025, letting you build a feed of just the accounts you care about instead of the algorithmic default
- The fediverse integration, where your Threads posts can be seen and replied to by people on Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps, has expanded well beyond the original test group
- Creator monetisation tests are live, with Meta trialling ad revenue share inside popular reply threads rather than a flat bonus pool
None of this is dramatic on its own. Together it tells you Meta has stopped treating Threads as an experiment and started treating it as permanent infrastructure, the same way it did with Reels.
The algorithm change nobody’s shouting about
Here’s the bit most roundups skip, and it’s the one that changes how you should post. When Threads launched, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said openly that the app would not proactively encourage news and politics in the feed. That stance has softened slightly, but the underlying mechanic hasn’t. Links out of Threads, whether to a news article, your blog, or your booking page, still get throttled compared to a plain text post or a native video.
I tested this myself over a 90-day run last year. I posted daily, mixing plain opinion posts, questions, and posts with a link to my site. The opinion posts regularly pulled 200 to 600 replies and thousands of likes. The link posts, same posting time, same account, same follower count, pulled a tenth of the engagement and single-digit click-throughs most days. Same pattern I saw on Twitter a decade ago, and the same pattern most agencies quietly know and rarely say out loud in their client reports because “we grew your followers” sounds better than “we couldn’t get anyone off the platform.”
If you want the full mechanics of why Threads behaves this way, I broke it down in what Threads is and how businesses can use it, which is worth reading before you build a content plan around this app.
What the growth numbers hide
Sensor Tower and Similarweb data through 2025 both showed something Meta doesn’t put in its press releases: average session length on Threads is short, often under four minutes, against Instagram’s 30-plus minutes. People open Threads, scroll fast, react fast, and leave. That’s fine for brand visibility and awful for anything requiring depth, like explaining a product or nurturing a lead.
This matters because plenty of the “Threads is the future” content out there conflates user count with attention. A platform can have 350 million people and still not be where your next client finds you and reads your offer. I still recommend clients test Threads, but I tell them to test it for reach and reputation, not for pipeline. If you want the full original take on whether this was ever going to be a genuine competitor to Twitter or just a well-timed clone, I wrote about that early on in Threads by Meta: social media game-changer or Twitter clone, and most of that scepticism has aged fairly well.
What’s changed for creators and businesses specifically
A few concrete, recent shifts worth knowing:
- Threads ads now support the same audience targeting as Instagram, including lookalike audiences built from your existing customer list, which makes them cheaper to test than most people assume, early CPMs I’ve seen reported by agency contacts sit noticeably below equivalent Instagram feed placements
- The search function got a real overhaul in 2025, meaning posts now surface in search results days or weeks after posting rather than disappearing after a few hours, which changes the case for evergreen content
- Verified organisations and creators get access to insights that show reply rate, not just likes, and reply rate is the metric Meta’s own algorithm appears to weight most heavily
- Trending topics reappeared in most regions after being pulled early on, giving businesses a genuine window to jump on conversations the way brands used to do on Twitter
None of this replaces a proper strategy. If you’re weighing up whether Threads deserves a slot in your content calendar at all, that decision sits inside a bigger question about where your time pays off, which is exactly the kind of prioritising I cover in 25 productivity habits for entrepreneurs, because posting on five platforms badly beats posting on two well every time.
How this connects to AI search, not just social
The other recent development worth flagging is less about Threads itself and more about where Threads content ends up. Public Threads posts are indexable and increasingly show up as sources when tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT answer questions about brands, products and even people. I’ve seen my own Threads replies quoted back in AI answers about social media strategy, which never happened with old tweets.
That means a sharp, specific Threads reply can now do double duty, it earns engagement on the platform and it becomes a citable snippet in an AI answer months later. I go into the mechanics of that in how to get cited on Perplexity, and the short version is that specific, factual, first-person statements outperform vague marketing lines in both places.
What to do with all this
If you’re running a business account, here’s the practical version of everything above, in order:
- Post plain opinion, question, and behind-the-scenes content most days, save links for maybe one post in ten
- Check your reply rate, not your like count, that’s the number the algorithm cares about and the number that predicts whether you’ll show up in someone’s feed tomorrow
- Build one custom feed of your five best referral sources or competitors so you’re not fighting the main algorithmic feed to see what matters
- Test a small ad budget, £50 to £100, against a lookalike audience from your existing email list before assuming Threads ads aren’t worth it
- Treat any traffic Threads sends you as a bonus, not a plan, your actual conversion work still needs to happen on your site and in your email list
If all this is starting to feel like a full-time job on top of your actual business, that’s usually the point where bringing in outside help pays for itself faster than trying to keep across every platform update solo. I’ve written honestly about what that costs and what to expect in hiring an AI marketing consultant in 2026, which covers exactly this kind of platform triage as part of a wider strategy.
The uncomfortable bit, the part most “Threads news” roundups leave out entirely, is that Meta built this platform to keep you inside Meta’s ecosystem, not to send you anywhere else. Every update, the ads, the DMs, the custom feeds, is designed to make Threads stickier for you as a poster, which is not the same thing as making it more profitable for you as a business owner. Know that going in and you’ll use it far better than most people currently are.
Frequently asked questions
Is Threads still growing in 2026?
Yes, Meta reported over 350 million monthly active users in recent earnings calls, up steadily from 175 million in April 2024, and the app has held that growth rather than spiking and collapsing like most early competitors did.
Does Threads have ads now?
Yes, Threads ads went fully global in 2025 and now run through the same Meta Ads Manager as Facebook and Instagram, using the same audience targeting including lookalike audiences from your existing customer lists.
Why don’t my links get much engagement on Threads?
Threads’ algorithm has always deprioritised posts with outbound links, a stance Adam Mosseri stated openly at launch, and that pattern has held, so plain text posts and native content consistently outperform link posts on the platform.
Is Threads worth it for a small business?
It’s worth it for reach, reputation and appearing in AI-generated search answers, but not as a direct traffic or sales channel, so treat it as a visibility tool sitting alongside your website and email list rather than a replacement for either.
