Instagram Stories AI system

UPDATED SEP 18, 2025
The content you see on your Instagram Stories is selected, ranked and delivered to you by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. Within one AI system, multiple machine learning models work together to deliver your experience. These models and their input signals are dynamic and they change frequently as the system learns and improves over time.

Overview of Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories is where you can share photos and videos with your friends, family and followers. These stories disappear after 24 hours unless you add them to your profile as story highlights or save them in your archive. When you view and interact with Instagram Stories, the underlying AI system automatically determines the order in which stories from people you follow show up in your stories.
How Instagram Stories works
The AI system behind Instagram Stories automatically shows you stories from people or accounts you follow by predicting what you’re most likely to be interested in. Here’s how it works:
  1. Gather available stories
    First, the system gathers all potential stories—excluding advertisements—shared by accounts you follow. It then attempts to remove stories that may go against our Community Guidelines.
  2. Leverage signals
    Next, the AI system considers a variety of input signals about each story. These signals might include who created the story and how you previously interacted with that person.
  3. Make predictions
    Based on those signals, the AI system makes a series of predictions about stories you’ll find most relevant and valuable.
  4. Apply additional filters
    The system narrows the pool of eligible content to the most relevant stories for you. Then, certain integrity processes are applied to every story. These determine which integrity measures, if any, need to be applied to the stories selected for ranking.
  5. Rank stories
    Finally, the system puts all the stories in order by score. Stories that the system predicts will be most valuable or relevant for you (those that have the highest score) are shown to you first in the Instagram Stories tray.
How to customize what you see
Your experience on Instagram Stories is personalized based on your activity, and you have options to control or customize what you see. Below, we describe how to do this with different in-product features. Options shown here may not be available to everyone.
Report a story
If you see someone's story and think it goes against Instagram's Community Guidelines, you can report it.
Hide
If you don't want someone to see your story, you can hide your story from them and prevent them from seeing anything you add to your story in the future.
Unfollow
To stop seeing stories from an account, you can unfollow that account. People won't be notified when you unfollow them.
See newest stories first
To see stories from the accounts you follow in reverse chronological order, starting with accounts in your Close Friends list, click "Following" on the home screen. On tablets, to see stories in reverse chronological order from accounts you follow, click “For You” on the Reels feed and then click “Latest” in the drop down list of options. Learn more.
Mute and unmute
If you don’t want to see someone’s story, you can mute it. Muting someone's story is different from unfollowing them and from muting their profile. If you mute their story, you'll still see their Instagram posts in your feed. You can also unmute someone’s story.
Change sensitive content
You can also choose to see more or less content that could be upsetting or offensive using the sensitive content options.
How the AI delivers content to you
We want you to see content you enjoy and find interesting. To achieve this, the AI system has models that help it make prediction models use underlying input signals to help select content you're most likely to engage with.
Below are some of the significant predictions–and input signals that inform them–that we use in this AI system.
How likely you are to click on a story that appears at the top of your home page
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • How much time, on average, you spend viewing stories
  • Which device platform you're using to view content, such as the web, Android or iOS
  • How many times you’ve viewed stories from the account
  • How many stories you have not seen
  • How often you view posts from the story's author
How likely you are to interact with question response of a story
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • Where data privacy laws permit, how many times you've interacted with the author's stories, such as by replying to them, compared to the number of stories from the author you've watched
  • The number of times a story by a particular author has been viewed
  • The first type of interaction you had with a post in the group, such as commenting or clicking to like
  • The average and maximum amounts of time you've spent viewing stories
  • How many stories you have not seen
How likely it is that you and the story’s author are family or good friends
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • Where data privacy laws permit, how many times you've interacted with the author's stories, such as by replying to them, compared to the number of stories from the author you've watched
  • Where data privacy laws permit, the number of messages exchanged between you and the story's author
  • Your relationship with the author
  • How likely it is that you have a connection with the story’s author outside of Instagram
  • The strength of your connection with the suggested person, such as whether or not you are friends with them on Facebook or if they are a friend of your friends
The likelihood of you clicking to reply to a story after viewing it
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • The total time you’ve spent viewing the author's stories
  • The strength of your connection with the suggested person, such as whether or not you are friends with them on Facebook or if they are a friend of your friends
  • How many stories you've replied to or reshared, and the average time you spend viewing each story
  • How many stories you have not seen
  • Where data privacy laws permit, how many times you've interacted with the author's stories, such as by replying to them, compared to the number of stories from the author you've watched
How likely you are to send a like
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • How many of the author's posts you've clicked to like
  • The first type of interaction you had with a post in the group, such as commenting or clicking to like
  • How many like you sent a like to the stories author
  • The number of times you've viewed stories by the author
  • The number of stories created by the author
How likely you are to tap into author's profile page from story viewer
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • How many times you’ve visited the account's profile
  • How many friends on Instagram a suggested account has in common with the profile you're viewing
  • How many author profiles you've clicked, and how many of those were accessed through your feed or through Instagram Explore
  • How many times you've viewed the author's profile and posts from that author
  • How many times you’ve sent friend requests to people who have posted a similar number of profile and cover photos as the suggested person has
How likely you are to save reels effect to camera from a story
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • The amount of interaction you've had with the Page, such as whether you've followed or liked it
  • The first type of interaction you had with a post in the group, such as commenting or clicking to like
  • Where data privacy laws permit, how many times you've interacted with the author's stories, such as by replying to them, compared to the number of stories from the author you've watched
  • How many like you sent a like to the stories author
  • The first type of interaction you had with a post in the group, such as commenting or clicking to like
How likely you are to swipe to next story
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • 1. How many times you've viewed stories, and the average amount of time you spend viewing them
  • How many times you've closed a story by clicking "X" to exit a collection of stories
  • The total number of stories in an author's collection, and the number of times you’ve viewed stories by that author
  • How many times you've dismissed videos that were shared in the same format as this video, such as by clicking “X,” “Hide reel” or “Show less”
  • How many stories you have not seen
How likely you are to tap exit the current story
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • How many times you've viewed stories, and the average amount of time you spend viewing them
  • The total number of stories in an author's collection, and the number of times you’ve viewed stories by that author
  • How many times you've dismissed videos that were shared in the same format as this video, such as by clicking “X,” “Hide reel” or “Show less”
  • How many stories you have not seen
  • How many times you've closed a story by clicking "X" to exit a collection of stories
How likely you are to interact with poll response or slider vote of a story
Signals influencing this prediction include:
  • How many of the author's posts you've clicked to like
  • How many times you've viewed stories, and the average amount of time you spend viewing them
  • The first type of interaction you had with a post in the group, such as commenting or clicking to like
  • The number of times you've viewed stories by the author
  • The average and maximum amounts of time you've spent viewing stories