Meta is considering charging business pages for posting links

Okay, this is a big one.

Meta is informing some users that they will soon be limited in the number of link posts they can share each month unless they pay for the Meta Verified subscription service.

As you can see in this explanation email, that was the case reshared by social media expert Matt Navarrasome page and professional mode profiles will be informed of the new organic link limit.

According to the notification message:

“Starting December 16, select Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus a verified badge and additional benefits to help protect your brand.”

That’s clearly a big change for anyone who uses Facebook for business, especially for publishers who share links to their posts in the app. Like social media today.

To be clear, this is a limited test at this time, so relatively few pages are affected. But understandably, many users are also looking for more information about the change, and whether it can be extended to all pages.

says Navarre that Meta confirmed him this is a limited test”to understand whether the ability to publish a larger number of posts with links adds additional value for Meta Verified subscribers.

(Note: We’ve asked Meta for more information and will update this post if/when we hear back.)

So Meta tries to accept it Meta-verifiedto make more money with the subscription option, which costs between $14.99 and $499 per month for business users, depending on which plan you choose.

We don’t have final numbers on Meta Verified’s absorption, but looking at Meta’s Q3 numbers, Meta’s ‘Other’ revenue absorption has continued to increase quarter-over-quarter and now stands at $690 million, which is more than double what it was when Meta launched Meta Verified in Q2 2023. That suggests many people and businesses are paying to get the benefits of Meta’s add-on subscription, which, aside from a verification tick, also offers fraud protection, better access to support, better search presence, and more.

And soon it might also be a requirement if you want to post links.

In some ways, I understand Meta’s risk vs. reward calculation here, especially considering how few reach link posts are seen in the app.

As you can see in this graph from Meta’s “Widely Viewed Content Report,” the latest edition published last week, Facebook posts with a link get very little reach in the app. This number is actually down from 9.8% in 2022, when Meta first started sharing this insight, and in this context you can see why Meta sees this as a low-risk attempt to get more pages to pay for Meta Verified.

Because if they don’t pay and they stop posting links, it won’t make a big difference to overall engagement.

But on the other hand, with the reform of the approach around news content in particular, at one point earlier this year it looked like Meta might once again give link posts more reach in its apps. That’s not indicated in the chart above, but some publishers had reported seeing an increase in referral links from Facebook after Facebook switched to the Community Notes-based approach.

(UPDATE: Meta told me TechCrunch that the test does not include publisher pages at this stage.)

This announcement denies that and once again underlines why you can’t trust Meta for traffic, because Meta will do what it benefits most at any given time. That makes good business sense too, of course, but social media managers should remember this when Meta asks them to post more Reels, or actually gives them tips on how to get more reach. You should certainly take note of such advice, but you should also try not to rely on the engagement and/or traffic gains you see as a result.

So again, just to clarify, this is a small-scale test at this point, and there’s no indication from Meta that this will make it a more universal approach for all pages and link posts.

But it could be, and that’s why you may need to assess your options in your posting strategy.

You can:

• Choose your best two links per month
• Start by posting your links in the first comment (also Meta’s experiment with constraints on this well)
• Instead, start posting Reels and focus on building brands on FB, rather than driving traffic
• Sign up for Meta Verified
• Stop posting on Facebook

The other consideration for Meta, aside from driving Meta Verified adoption, is that it could help reduce spammy links by forcing companies to pay to play, essentially pricing spammers out of the market (or at least large-scale spammers).

Maybe that will improve the overall Facebook experience, and maybe that’s enough reason to at least test this.

Either way, it could be a big change that could have a major impact on your 2026 strategy.