What Meta has actually said, what advertisers report, how many new ads to plan for, and how to tell when an ad is worn out.
By Leo-Paul Benichou, founder of Whim Creative. Updated October 27, 2026.
Andromeda is the system Meta uses to shortlist ads before the auction. For each person, it narrows tens of millions of ads down to a few thousand. Meta now calls creative diversification the best lever for finding the right audiences. So the work is to keep feeding your account ads that are truly different from each other, in idea and in format, on a steady schedule.
Meta picks the ad you see in steps. The first step is called retrieval. Meta's engineering team says this step selects ads "from tens of millions of ad candidates into a few thousand relevant ad candidates." After that, larger ranking models predict which of those ads will do best for the person and for the advertiser.
Andromeda is the system that runs that first step. Meta announced it on its engineering blog on December 2, 2024. In that post, Meta said Andromeda improved recall by 6% and ads quality by 8% on selected segments. It also said more than a million advertisers had used its generative AI tools to make more than 15 million ads in one month, and that it expects the number of ad creatives in its system to grow significantly.
Here's why that matters to you. An ad that doesn't make the shortlist for a person never gets ranked for that person. Your bid can't help an ad that was never in the running.
As of October 2026, these are the clearest things Meta has said in public about creative and Andromeda.
What Meta hasn't published, as of October 2026, is a similarity score you can check, a rule for how different an ad must be, or one number of ads per ad set that fits every account.
The points below come from media buyers and agencies. Meta hasn't confirmed them, but they're widely reported.
If Meta's system can't tell two ads apart, ten small edits of one ad give it close to one real choice. Ten different ideas give it ten. So plan your creative from the top down.
Here's a quick check. List every ad running in your account. Cross out the ones that only changed a headline, color, crop or song. Count what's left. If 20 ads come down to 3 ideas, you're testing 3 ideas.
Variations still have a job. Once a concept wins, new hooks and cuts of it can stretch its life. They just shouldn't make up most of what you test.
It depends on spend. Meta doesn't set one number for every account, so any single number you hear is a rule of thumb. Here's a simple way to work out your own.
Here's an example with made-up numbers. A brand spends $100,000 a month on Meta and puts 20% into testing, so $20,000. Its target cost per purchase is $50, and it wants about 20 purchases per concept before judging, so $1,000 per concept. That's room for about 20 new concepts a month, or around 5 a week. A brand at $50,000 a month has room for about half that. Your numbers will be different, and the math works the same way.
Creative fatigue is when an ad stops working as well because people have seen it, or ads like it, too many times.
Meta can flag it for you in some cases. Ads Manager can show a Creative limited or Creative fatigue status in the Delivery column, mostly for ad sets running a single creative, and Meta has a help page on creative fatigue. It says Creative limited means cost per result is above ads you ran in the past but under double, and Creative fatigue means double or more.
Don't wait for the label. These signs often show up first.
Fatigue can come from sameness as well as age. Meta says ads that are too similar can reach the same people and run into these statuses. So a brand-new ad that looks like your old winner can start out tired. More on fixing it in our guide to Meta ads creative fatigue.
There are many ways to test on Meta. This one is simple and built around variety.
For a deeper version, with hook tests and sample sizes, see how to test AI ads.
Whim Creative is an AI performance creative agency for DTC brands on Meta. We make AI performance creative in many formats, including UGC-style, talking head, animated, product and sensorial video, plus statics. That range is built for the kind of variety Meta asks for.
Each batch is planned from what won in the last one. You approve the plan before anything gets made, and every ad gets a human edit before it ships. You can see examples in our best AI ads gallery and read how our AI creative agency works.
If you spend $50K or more a month on Meta and want more real variety in your account, see if we're a fit.
Andromeda is the system Meta uses for the first step of choosing which ad to show. For each person, it narrows tens of millions of possible ads down to a few thousand. Larger ranking models then pick from that shortlist. Meta announced it on its engineering blog in December 2024.
It depends on your budget. As of October 2026, Meta hasn't set one number for every account. Its Help Center says to keep the number of ads per ad set down and put up to 10 creative assets in one ad, and a 2024 post suggests at least 20 diversified ads in Advantage+ shopping campaigns. If most of your ads get almost no spend, you have more ads than budget.
Meta hasn't published a rule or a similarity score you can check. It says creative that's too similar may not be recognized as different. A new concept, a new format or a new person on screen is a real change. Advertisers report that a new headline or color on the same video tends to act like the same ad.
Meta hasn't said it does. Its own posts push advertisers to use its generative AI tools, and its engineering team said it expects the number of ads to grow a lot because of those tools. What Meta does warn about is creative that's too similar, however it was made.
It's when an ad stops working as well because the same people have seen it, or ads like it, too many times. Costs go up and clicks go down. Meta can show a Creative limited or Creative fatigue status in the Delivery column of Ads Manager.
More from Whim Creative on making and testing creative for Meta.
Why ads wear out on Meta, how to spot it early, and how to keep fresh, tested creative in the account.
A testing framework for AI ads: hook variations, angle testing, sample sizes, and how tagging finds the winner.
How Whim Creative plans, produces and edits AI video ads and statics for DTC brands on Meta.
Curated AI ad examples with the hook, pacing and CTA broken down, so you can borrow the pattern.