Reach and Engagement — the two badge axes
Every post is judged on two axes, independently: Reach — how far it spread — and Engagement — how much the people who saw it interacted with it. Both are measured against the profile's own recent history, the way all calibration works.
A post can earn a badge on one axis, on both, or on neither. The two never affect each other.
Reach — how far it spread
Reach measures a post's views against the profile's own follower count. That's what makes it fair across sizes: a small account and a large one are each asked to beat their own normal, so a modest-looking post from a small profile can out-reach a big-numbers post from a large one.
In the app the metric is labelled simply Reach. The technical name, VFR, appears only in the ⓘ hover tooltip:
How far this post spread. Views measured against the profile's follower count (VFR: views ÷ followers).
Reach is the fast axis. A post's spread shows up almost immediately, so a Reach badge can land as early as the post's first tracked hour.
Engagement — how much it resonated
Engagement measures the likes, comments, and any shares or saves the platform reports, set against how far the post travelled. On videos that comparison is against views; on still posts — Instagram carousels, Facebook photos — against followers.
The app label is just Engagement, with the ratio behind it in the ⓘ tooltip.
Engagement waits. It starts appearing on day 3 — the top question about this badge, and a deliberate delay.
In a post's first hours the audience is mostly the profile's most loyal followers, who like and comment far more heavily than the wider audience arriving later. Judged that early, almost everything would look like a runaway hit.
So Huntit holds the verdict until the post has had a few days to settle, then confirms or upgrades it at the later checkpoints, out to day 30.
The practical effect: a brand-new winner often shows a Reach badge with no Engagement badge yet. That's a verdict not yet reached — not a missing badge.
Two other things hold an Engagement badge back, and neither is a verdict.
When a platform hides a post's likes or comments, there's no rate to measure. The post sits out the Engagement axis entirely: no badge, and no place in the pool the profile's threshold is drawn from, so it can't drag that threshold down for its neighbours. Its Reach is unaffected.
When enough of a profile's posts are unmeasurable that way, the Engagement side falls under the 30 posts it needs and the profile holds no Engagement threshold at all.
The panel says so — No thresholds yet — N of 30 measurable posts — while Reach badges normally. It recovers on its own as measurable posts come in.
The second is the post's own interaction count. A video carrying fewer than 25 interactions isn't judged on Engagement, and the post's modal says so — Engagement not judged — under 25 interactions.
What each one tells you
A Reach badge means the post reached far more people than this profile's posts usually do — from outside, a platform push and paid promotion look the same, so it says nothing about why. And it says nothing about whether the people who saw it cared; that's the other axis.
An Engagement badge means the content connected with the audience that saw it. A post that earns Engagement while barely reaching anyone for this profile is marked high engagement, very low reach — it didn't reach far, but the people who saw it reacted.
Still posts have only one axis
Instagram publishes no public view count for carousels, and Facebook none for photos, so those posts carry no Reach axis at all — you'll never see a Reach badge on one (see Pools). They very much have an Engagement axis, measured against followers, so a still post that resonates wins exactly like a video does.
TikTok carousels are the other case: TikTok does publish their view counts, so they're judged on both axes, like any other TikTok post.
That's the one difference worth keeping straight. An axis short of its 30 posts is paused and comes back on its own; a still pool's Reach axis doesn't exist at all, so there's nothing to wait for.
Both axes come in two tiers — ⭐ Top 10% and 🔥 Top 20% — depending on how far above the profile's threshold the post landed. See ⭐ Top 10% and 🔥 Top 20%.