X Highlights tab: what it does and who can use it

#Quick answer

Highlights is a separate tab on your X profile that shows only the posts you have chosen to feature. You add a post from its three-dot menu by tapping "Add/remove from Highlights," and the same item removes it. It requires a paid X subscription, works on iOS, Android and the web, and unlike a pin it holds many posts rather than one. It is a curation surface, not a reach lever.

Last updated: September 2026

#TL;DR

Most pages ranking for this query sell the tab as an impressions machine. That framing sets you up to be disappointed. Highlights changes what a visitor reads once they are already looking at your profile, which is genuinely valuable, but it is a different job from getting the post in front of people in the first place. This guide covers the exact steps, the paid gate, how the tab differs from the free pin, what belongs in it, and the two things X has never published about it that you should account for before you start curating.

#How to add a post to Highlights on X

Adding and removing run through one menu item, and the flow is identical on both apps and the web:

1. Open one of your own posts, or find it on your profile.
2. Tap the three-dot (More) menu at the top right of that post.
3. Choose Add/remove from Highlights.

That is it. The post now appears in the Highlights tab on your profile. To take it out, open the same three-dot menu on the same post and tap the same item again. There is no separate "remove" screen and no confirmation dialog to hunt for, which is why people sometimes assume removal is impossible: it is the identical menu entry doing the reverse.

TechCrunch's coverage of the rollout, published 15 August 2023, describes exactly this menu item, and X's own @Premium announcement scoped it to verified accounts on iOS, Android and web. Nothing about the mechanics has changed since.

#Who gets the tab

Access sits behind the subscription. X announced Highlights for verified users, which in practice means an account with an active paid subscription, and there has never been a free tier for it.

If the tab is missing from your profile, the diagnosis is short:

The last row catches more people than it should. X's profile tabs are rendered client-side and a long-running app session will happily show you yesterday's layout.

Whether the subscription is worth buying for this feature alone is an easy no. Our breakdown of X Premium pricing and what each tier includes covers what you are actually paying for, and Highlights sits well down that list behind the checkmark, reply prioritization and monetization eligibility. Treat it as a bonus on a subscription you bought for other reasons.

#Highlights vs the pinned post

These get conflated constantly, and the distinction is the most useful thing on this page. They are not competing features; they are different slots with different economics.

The pin gets read by everyone who lands on your profile. The tab gets read by the fraction who are already interested enough to click a second time. That asymmetry decides what goes where: your strongest single introduction or current offer goes in the pin, and the portfolio goes in the tab. If you have not set the free one up yet, start there with how to pin a post on X, and use a proven structure from our pinned tweet templates.

A useful mental model: the pin is your headline, Highlights is your archive page.

#The reach claim, checked

Search this query and you will find pages promising that the tab will "skyrocket your impressions." Worth being precise about what is and is not established here.

What is documented: the tab exists, paid accounts can add posts to it, and profile visitors can browse it.

What is not documented anywhere by X: that highlighting a post changes how that post is ranked, recommended, or distributed. There is no statement to that effect in the launch announcement or in X's Premium documentation, and the posts in the tab are the same posts they were before you toggled the menu item.

So where does the reported lift come from? Almost certainly from visitor behaviour. A profile visitor who finds three strong posts instead of a wall of replies reads more, follows more, and comes back. That produces real numbers in your analytics, and those numbers are worth having. They are just downstream of curation, not of a ranking change. If you want to measure it honestly, watch profile visits and follows in your native X analytics dashboard rather than attributing impressions to the tab, and read what a good X engagement rate looks like before deciding whether anything moved.

That distinction changes your effort allocation. If the tab were a distribution lever, you would highlight aggressively. Since it is a conversion surface, you highlight selectively.

#What actually belongs in the tab

A tab with forty entries is a timeline with extra steps. The value comes from the editing.

• Your best thread, not your most recent one. Threads are the format that survives being read months later. What makes the best X threads work is a decent filter for which of yours qualifies.
• Proof, not opinions. A launch, a result, a shipped thing, a case study. Someone opening the tab is deciding whether you are worth following, and evidence answers that faster than takes do.
• One post per theme. If you write about three things, three or four highlights cover it. Redundancy inside the tab dilutes each entry.
• Nothing that expires. A post about a sale that ended reads worse than no post at all. That is the pin's job, because the pin is easy to swap.
• Rotate it quarterly. Not because X rewards freshness in the tab, but because a shelf you last touched in March describes an account that stopped caring.

Six to ten entries is a reasonable ceiling for most accounts. X has not published a hard limit, so this is a judgment call about the reader rather than a platform constraint.

#Two things X has not published

Worth knowing where the documentation stops, because guides tend to paper over these with confident guesses.

There is no stated maximum. X does not publish a cap on how many posts you can highlight. The 6-to-12 range you see quoted around the web is editorial advice, not a platform limit. Plan around readability, not around a number someone invented.

The lapse behaviour is undocumented. X has not published what happens to the Highlights tab if your subscription ends. The posts themselves are ordinary posts and do not go anywhere, but whether the tab keeps rendering for visitors is not something X states. The safe assumption is that a paid surface stops when the payment does. Practically, that means Highlights should never be the only place a reader can find your important work: keep the pin current and keep the threads linkable, so nothing depends on a tab you rent monthly.

Neither gap is a reason to skip the feature. They are a reason not to build your profile strategy on top of it.

#Where the tab fits in a profile that works

One narrow problem is solved well here: a visitor who wants more than one post from you can get it without scrolling past your replies. That is worth the two taps it costs.

It does not solve the problem underneath it. A beautifully curated tab above a timeline whose last post was five weeks ago converts nobody, because the visitor checks the dates. The pin, the tab and the bio are all framing for the same underlying question, which is whether this account is alive and worth a slot in someone's feed.

That consistency is the hard part, and it is the reason most profiles never get a shelf worth curating. X-Autopilot drafts your posts and replies in your voice from real Chrome on your own Mac, so the session cookie stays on your machine rather than passing through a shared cloud dashboard: a lower detection surface than cloud schedulers, not an absence of risk, and browser-route automation on X remains a gray area rather than a sanctioned path under X's automation rules. It will not curate the tab for you. What it fixes is the blank timeline that makes the curation pointless.

Set the pin, highlight four posts you would be happy for a stranger to judge you by, and spend the rest of the effort on the feed underneath them.