A look at Meta’s 2026 Facebook update for alcohol brands—and what past algorithm shifts can teach us.
In January 2026, Meta announced an update to Facebook that affects wine, beer, and spirits brands. Under the new policy, alcohol-related business pages are no longer eligible to be algorithmically recommended on Facebook, meaning their content may appear less frequently to users who do not already follow them.
While the announcement has generated understandable concern across the industry, this type of shift is far from unprecedented. In fact, Meta has made similar moves before—and history offers valuable insight into what happens next.
Under Meta’s 2026 update, alcohol-related business pages are excluded from Facebook’s recommendation system. This impacts organic discovery on Facebook, particularly reach to non-followers and follower growth driven by the algorithm.
However, it’s critical to separate perception from reality.
This update:
Instagram discovery, engagement, and growth remain fully intact, and paid media across both platforms continues as usual.
To understand the significance of this change, it helps to look back.
In January 2018, Meta announced a major overhaul of the Facebook News Feed, stating it would prioritize content from friends, family, and groups over posts from brands, publishers, and media companies. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that public content from businesses was “crowding out” personal interactions—and that users would begin seeing less content from Pages as a result.
The industry reaction was swift. Brands across all categories experienced:
For many, it felt disruptive. For some, it felt existential.
What followed, however, was not the collapse of brand marketing on Facebook—but an evolution. Brands that adapted successfully leaned into several key strategies:
Engagement-Driven Content
Rather than optimizing for impressions or frequency, brands focused on content that sparked conversation—comments, shares, and meaningful interaction—aligning with what the algorithm rewarded.
Community and Creator Strategies
Influencer partnerships, employee advocacy, and community-led content became more effective than traditional brand broadcasting, as personal accounts carried more algorithmic weight.
Strategic Paid Media
As organic reach declined, paid advertising became a more consistent and reliable way to maintain visibility. While Meta framed the 2018 changes around user experience, the practical outcome was clear: brands increasingly used paid media to support reach, targeting, and scale.
Platform Diversification
Perhaps most importantly, brands stopped treating Facebook as a single point of failure. Instagram, video-first platforms, and other emerging channels became central to growth strategies.
The parallels to today are hard to ignore.
Once again, Meta is refining how discovery works on Facebook. Once again, organic reach is becoming more limited for brands. And once again, the change reinforces trends that were already underway rather than introducing something entirely new.
For alcohol brands in particular, Facebook has not been the primary engine of organic discovery for years. Growth has increasingly been driven by:
Seen through this lens, the 2026 update is less a disruption and more a continuation of a long-standing shift in how platforms balance personal content, brand content, and monetization.
The key takeaway from both 2018 and 2026 is simple: platforms evolve, but fundamentals matter more than ever.
There is no reason for brands to panic—or to overhaul strategy overnight. Instead, the most resilient brands will:
History shows that brands that respond thoughtfully—not reactively—are the ones that continue to grow when the algorithm shifts.
And if the past is any indication, this won’t be the last time Meta adjusts the rules of the game.
