Blog · Meta Andromeda
Meta Andromeda: what changed, and what it means for your creative
Robert Lai · Kaliber Creatives · 27 September 2026 · 6-minute read
Andromeda decides which of your ads get considered at all, before any bid matters. Here is what Meta has published about it, why it moves the weight onto your creative, and how to check whether your ads give it anything to choose from.
- What Andromeda is
- Why creative carries the weight
- Ideas versus outfits
- A real account, grouped
- What to do
- What Meta doesn't publish
01What Andromeda is
Meta introduced Andromeda on its engineering blog in December 2024. It is the first stage of how Meta chooses which ad a person sees, and it runs before the auction.
“Retrieval is the first step in our multi-stage ads recommendation system … selecting ads from tens of millions of ad candidates into a few thousand relevant ad candidates.”Engineering at Meta, Meta Andromeda, 2 December 2024
02Why creative now carries the weight
Meta built Andromeda for a system with far more ads in it. Advantage+ and generative tools keep adding eligible ads, and Meta is explicit about what it wants from that growth:
“Increased ad diversity can improve people's experience with ads and drive better advertiser outcomes.”Engineering at Meta, Meta Andromeda
When the pool grows that fast, more ads is no advantage on its own. The shortlist is personal, so what helps is having different things to say to different people.
12 ads, 1 idea
One way in. Everyone the idea doesn't speak to is left out.
12 ads, 4 ideas
Four ways in, each speaking to a different buyer or need.
03Ideas versus outfits
Most accounts answer “diversify” with new colours, crops and headlines on the same claim. That changes how an ad looks, not what it says. We call each distinct claim a creative identity: what the ad says, and who it's for.
04A real account, grouped
This is what the gap looks like in practice. We read the live Ad Library of a consumer-appliance advertiser and grouped every ad by what it claims. Brand withheld; the numbers are real.
05What to do
- Count ideas, not ads.Group your live ads by what they claim and who they're for. If the idea count is close to the ad count, you've counted variants as ideas.
- Look at the spread.If one idea carries most of your ads, most of your account rides on that one idea holding up.
- Brief new ideas, not new outfits.A new reason to buy, a new buyer or a new kind of argument is a new idea. A new background is not.
- Keep depth where you have proof.Around ideas already winning on your own results, vary the hook and format but keep the claim.
06What Meta doesn't publish
Meta has published
- That retrieval runs first and narrows tens of millions of ads to a few thousand
- That more diverse ads can improve people's experience and advertiser outcomes
- Its own performance figures for the system
Meta hasn't published
- How many distinct ideas an account should run
- When one idea carries too much of an account
- Any way to see how diverse your own ads are
Any number you see for the right-hand column, including ours, is a benchmark rather than a Meta rule. We label ours Kaliber benchmark and adjust them as audits accumulate.
See how many ideas your account runs
The Andromeda Autopsy reads your live Meta Ad Library, removes the duplicates and groups your ads into distinct ideas, like the example above. Free, no login, no account access.
Source: Meta Andromeda: Supercharging Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine, Engineering at Meta, 2 December 2024. Illustrative examples use a fictional brand. Kaliber is not affiliated with Meta.