Blog / API & technical

WhatsApp deliverability: understanding and improving Quality Rating

The WhatsApp Quality Rating is the indicator that, with the official Meta APIs, decides how healthy your number is and how much you can send. Many focus on the risk of a ban but ignore this traffic light, which is actually the real thermometer of deliverability. A high rating means messages that arrive and sending limits that grow; a low rating means delivery at risk and cut volumes. In this guide we look at what it is, what makes it drop and how to protect it.

What Quality Rating is

Quality Rating is an assessment Meta assigns to your WhatsApp Business number based on how users react to your messages over a certain period. It is based mainly on negative signals: how many people block you, how many report you, how many choose to stop receiving your messages. It is typically represented with three states, often associated with a color: high (green), medium (yellow) and low (red). It is linked to sending limits: a healthy rating lets you scale, a compromised one reduces them.

What makes it drop

• Blocks: users who block your number because they weren't expecting the message.
• Reports: people who report messages as spam.
• Unsolicited messages: writing to those who didn't give opt-in.
• Irrelevant content: off-target or too frequent promotions.
• Excessive frequency: bombarding the same contacts in a short time.

Why it matters more than the ban itself

The ban is the extreme and visible outcome, but Quality Rating is the signal that precedes it. A rating that drops is a warning: something in the way you communicate is annoying people. Acting when the traffic light turns yellow prevents you from reaching red and then the block. That's why monitoring it is more useful than merely hoping not to get banned: it's prevention instead of cure.

How to improve (and protect) the rating

The golden rule is simple: only write to those who want to hear from you, and tell them things that interest them. A cleanly collected opt-in is the foundation of everything: those who chose to receive your messages rarely block you. From there, take care of relevance (use tags to segment and don't send the same thing to everyone), keep a sensible frequency and always offer an easy way to stop receiving messages. A customer who can leave with one click reports you far less than one who feels trapped.

If the rating drops to yellow, don't increase volumes to recover: do the opposite. Slow down, send only to the warmest contacts and let the signal stabilize before restarting.

The link with sending limits

Quality Rating and messaging tier go hand in hand. A healthy rating is the condition for scaling sending limits and reaching more contacts over time; a compromised rating can block growth or push you back. Anyone wanting to increase volumes must therefore treat the rating as an asset to protect, not a warning light to ignore until it flashes red.

How to do it with SendApp

With SendApp Agent, if you use the official Meta APIs, you have the tools to communicate in a way that protects the rating: opt-in handled correctly, a CRM with tags to segment and send only to the right contacts, approved templates and targeted broadcast campaigns instead of blanket ones. The AI agent helps you reply quickly, and healthy conversations with customers who expect your messages are the best defense of the Quality Rating. If you prefer a path without the official APIs' rating system, WhatsApp Web via QR code remains available, with its own usage rules.

How much it costs

SendApp starts at 19 euros per month. With the official Meta APIs, Cloud API messages are billed by Meta according to its rates, with no SendApp markup; via WhatsApp Web with QR you don't pay per message. Protecting the Quality Rating has no additional cost: it's a matter of method, and it's what lets you scale volumes without risking delivery.