If you are looking for your Klout score, there isn’t one any more. Klout shut down on 25 May 2018. Lithium Technologies, which had bought it in 2014 for a reported $200 million, announced the closure two weeks earlier and said the service was “not aligned with” its long-term strategy. The shutdown landed on the same day the European GDPR came into force — a coincidence of timing that was widely noticed for a product whose entire business was scoring people from their social data.
So this is not a guide to using Klout. It is the more useful article: what a Klout score actually measured, why single-number influence scores keep dying, and what to look at instead.
What Klout actually measured
Klout produced one number between 1 and 100, updated daily, meant to represent your influence across social networks. It pulled from the platforms you connected — at various points Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and others — and weighed signals like how many people engaged with your posts, and how influential those people were in turn.
That recursive idea was the clever part, and it was borrowed from how search engines rank pages: a link from an important page counts for more than a link from an unimportant one. Applied to people, an interaction from a widely followed account counted for more than one from a quiet account.
It also assigned you topics it believed you were influential about, and offered “Perks” — free products from brands hoping that high scorers would post about them.
Why the number was always shakier than it looked
Three problems sat underneath the score, and they are worth understanding because they recur in every metric of this shape.
It could only see what it was allowed to see. Klout measured the accounts you connected and the platforms whose APIs it could read. Influence exercised in a newsletter, a podcast, a Slack community, a conference talk or a private group was invisible to it. The score was not a measure of your influence; it was a measure of your API-visible influence.
It was gameable, and people gamed it. Any score people want to raise attracts behaviour designed to raise it. Posting frequently, engaging with high scorers, and joining reciprocal-engagement groups all moved the number without moving anything real.
A single number collapsed things that should stay separate. Reach is not engagement. Engagement is not persuasion. Persuasion is not the ability to make someone buy, hire, or change their mind. Klout added them into one figure, and a figure with no units cannot be checked against reality.
The deepest problem is the one that outlived the product: the score was never validated against an outcome. Nobody demonstrated that a Klout score of 70 produced more of anything you would care about than a score of 50.
A short detour about confident predictions
Articles about social media love to quote a technology executive dismissing an obvious future. The most repeated example is usually rendered as an IBM chief saying a computer had no place in the home.
That version is wrong in three separate ways, and correcting it makes a better point than the myth did.
The line came from Ken Olsen, the founder and chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation — not IBM — speaking at a World Future Society meeting in 1977. What he actually said was: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” And, as Snopes and Quote Investigator both document, he was not dismissing personal computers. He was talking about a central computer that would run the household — regulating temperature, choosing entertainment, managing the food supply — and arguing that people would not want their lives administered that way.
DEC sold personal computers. Olsen had one in his own home.
The reason to get this right in an article about Klout is that both stories work the same way. A tidy, confident summary travels further than the complicated truth — whether it is a misquoted executive or a number claiming to rank human influence from 1 to 100. The useful instinct is the same in both cases: ask what the claim is actually based on.
What to measure instead
The question Klout tried to answer is still a real one: is what I am doing on social media working? Here is how to answer it without a third-party score.
Start from an outcome, not a number. Decide what social activity is supposed to produce — newsletter signups, enquiries, job offers, event attendance, traffic to something you own. Everything below is only useful in relation to that.
Use each platform’s own analytics. LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and the rest all report impressions, engagement and follower change directly. This data has the advantage of being counted rather than modelled, and it is free.
Measure referral traffic in your own analytics. Your analytics tool will tell you how many people actually arrived from each platform and what they did next. A post with modest engagement that sends twenty of the right people to your site beats a viral post that sends none.
Watch direction, not position. A single reading tells you nothing. Compare a rolling period against the previous one — are impressions rising, is engagement rate holding as reach grows, is referral traffic increasing?
Track the things that don’t appear in any dashboard. Who mentioned you unprompted. Who replied. Which post caused someone to email you. These are lagging, unquantified and by far the best indicators that you are influencing anyone.
The lesson worth keeping
Klout is not the only measurement product to vanish since 2015. Alexa’s website ranking service closed in 2022 after twenty-five years. Third-party scoring tools are built on other companies’ APIs and other companies’ willingness to keep providing them, and when the terms change or the economics stop working, the score disappears and takes your history with it.
So build your measurement on things you own or can observe directly — your own analytics, your own list, platform-native numbers you can export, and the outcomes you actually care about. A tool that produces a proprietary number is a tool that can stop producing it.
And be suspicious of any single figure offered as a summary of something complicated. The value of a metric comes from being able to check it against reality. A number you cannot validate is not a measurement; it is a claim with a decimal point.
Frequently asked questions
Is Klout coming back? No. It shut down on 25 May 2018 and was not sold on or revived. Its parent company, Lithium Technologies, has since rebranded as Khoros and operates in enterprise social management rather than consumer influence scoring.
Can I still get my Klout score or history? No. The site and the score were retired together, and the data went with them. That is the practical argument for exporting anything you care about from any platform that offers an export.
What is the closest replacement? There is no direct successor, and that is the honest answer. Consumer influence scoring largely did not survive. What remains is platform-native analytics for individuals, and enterprise social-listening tools that answer a different question at a different price.
Did a high Klout score actually mean anything? It meant you were active on connected platforms and engaged with well-followed accounts. It was never demonstrated to predict any outcome a business would care about, which is the criticism that stuck.
Are follower counts a better measure? No — they are worse in a different way. Followers measure accumulated reach, not current attention, and they include people who never see your posts. Engagement rate against a stated goal is more informative than either.
More on measurement is collected under measuring what matters. You may also find how to measure websites now that Alexa Rank is gone and measuring network performance useful.