WhatsApp Business compliance, explained plainly

The 24-hour customer service window

You can send a free-form message to a customer only within 24 hours of their last message to you. Outside that window, only pre-approved template messages are allowed. This is the single most common cause of automated WhatsApp accounts getting flagged — a bot that keeps sending free-form follow-ups to someone who went quiet three days ago.

The practical fix: track the timestamp of the customer's last inbound message, and once 24 hours pass, switch to an approved template for any further outreach rather than a free-form message.

Consent and opt-in

A customer needs to have opted in to receive messages from your business — typically by messaging you first, or by explicitly consenting through a signup flow. Sending unsolicited outbound messages to a purchased or scraped number list is exactly the kind of behavior Meta's policy is designed to catch.

Opt-out has to actually work

If a customer replies "stop", "unsubscribe" or similar, your system needs to recognize it and stop messaging that number — not just log it and continue. An automated agent that keeps talking after a customer has clearly asked to be left alone is a direct policy violation, not just bad practice.

Prohibited content categories

Regardless of consent, certain categories are restricted or prohibited outright on WhatsApp Business — firearms, alcohol, drugs, gambling, adult content, multi-level marketing and payday loans among them. If your business touches any of these categories, review Meta's commerce policy before building automated messaging around it, not after.

Automated responses need a human escalation path

A fully automated conversation that never offers a way to reach a human — especially for a complaint or a request the bot can't handle — is a common source of user complaints, which is exactly the signal Meta uses to review accounts.