X makes overtures to journalists with new feature designed to improve reach for links

Have you left Twitter? Would a new “link experience” be enough to lure you back?

The platform formerly known as Twitter announced it was testing a new way to boost engagement for posts with links on Sunday evening. As X head of product Nikita Bier wrote:

We’re testing a new link experience, starting on iOS — to make it easier for your followers to engage with your post while browsing links.

For creators, a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn’t get a clear signal whether the content is any good.

To help get better signal, posts will now collapse to the bottom of the page so people can react while you’re reading.

As always, remember: the post should stand alone as great content so write a solid caption.

Bier added an appeal to a specific type of X user. “If you’re a writer or journalist who left X in the last couple years,” he tweeted, “coming back could be the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career.”

X has discouraged posts with links, disproportionately promoted right-wing political content, and throttled access to some news sites in the past. Traffic referrals to news sites from X — though never huge — “cratered” in recent years.  The Guardian, NPR, and Le Monde are among the news organizations that have quit the platform entirely. Some journalists, including a number who had reported on X owner Elon Musk, were suspended from the platform in 2022.

Reporters and other link-sharing creators have often resorted to screenshots and a link to the original source in the reply to improve reach. Bier, however, denied links are “deboosted” and said that their relative lack of reach was due only to “lower engagement.” The new “link experience” is an attempted fix.

My read is that this doesn’t affect the algorithm per se, but creates a lower like/retweet nav bar while you scroll a link so that you’re more aware you still inside the X app (and ideally I guess like or rt the post?). I think that’s actually a pretty good addition to the in-app… https://t.co/32rPBMZLt5

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) October 20, 2025

Great site example!@stratechery was built on Twitter. It was always disappointing it basically died as a distribution channel, but what really bummed me out is that others didn’t have the same opportunity to get big enough to manage without. Very glad to see these changes. https://t.co/3FZ81h9Tod

— Ben Thompson (@benthompson) October 19, 2025

Interesting call X head of product considering how some journalists were treated on X in recent years https://t.co/P8VzBsRnCY

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) October 19, 2025

Curious bc in the past when asked about this Musk and his leaders were clear that they wanted people to hang out on his platform – if you had something interesting to say you should post it on the platform. It wasnt framed as a technical problem, but as a strategy.

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) October 20, 2025