Prioritize your messages at scale with the Twilio Traffic Optimization Engine

Prioritize your messages at scale with the Twilio Traffic Optimization Engine

You count on Twilio to get your messages delivered on time, every time. As more and more business interactions move to messaging, there’s pressure on the finite resources of networks. Sending messages to consumers is no longer just about reaching their phone screen, but sending timely, thoughtful, and impactful messages to drive meaningful engagement globally.

As messaging volumes sent through Twilio have soared, we’ve doubled down on our investment in messaging quality for all of our customers. That includes our Traffic Optimization Engine, a new suite of functionality to help you achieve global messaging deliverability and prioritization at scale.

Whether you’re scaling geographically, expanding use cases, adding new sender types, or growing the sheer volume of messages you send, you may begin to run into deliverability and messaging throughput issues caused by the strain on the carriers’ networks and how your messages are prioritized and delivered. A prime example of this is the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2025, more than 6.9 billion messages were supported by Twilio in that week alone.

Building a messaging platform for global scale and reliability

Some of our largest and fastest-growing customers have more intensive needs when it comes to scaling their messaging, and sometimes require a more hands-on approach from our product and engineering teams. To ensure deliverability at scale during big sending opportunities like Cyber Week, we spend months partnering with our customers to architect their messaging solutions. But we asked ourselves: what if that same level of planning and scale could happen automatically and throughout the year?

Traffic Optimization Engine now enables you to do just that by working across different networks, senders, geographies, and use cases to ensure that your most timely messages are delivered based on your highest priority needs and without overwhelming the carrier networks. This means that your messages will be delivered in the time you and your customers expect – something other providers can’t always do.

Our system of traffic shaping and priority queueing is based on the capabilities of each carrier, each sender, and each message type, which allows us to ensure that one-time passwords, for example, get through quickly while marketing messages send within a reasonable timeframe and are cost effective.

What’s inside Traffic Optimization Engine?

Traffic Optimization Engine consists of a range of features and products that work together, or individually, to give you granular control over your messaging deliverability, throughput allocation, and prioritization of their messaging solution at scale. Each of these products works seamlessly with our Programmable Messaging API and is implemented in partnership with our Product and Engineering teams, ensuring that you’ll have personalized support in achieving deliverability at scale. The features included are:

• Real-time Routing 
  Patented algorithms optimize your messaging traffic for maximum deliverability across 4,800+ carrier connections every 75 seconds, ensuring deliverability even when you’re sending high-volume messaging traffic.
• Multitenancy 
  This tool dynamically assigns equal messaging throughput across all teams or customers of an independent software vendor (ISV) to ensure fair distribution of throughput across messages. This allows you to balance your traffic for optimum sending across all use cases, internal teams, or customers using your platform.
• Market Throughput 
  A delivery architecture that maximizes sending capacity by managing rate limits (MPS) at the country and sender-type level rather than enforcing isolated, static sender caps. Market Throughput dynamically aligns outbound volume with localized carrier limits and regulatory quotas, preventing carrier throttling and eliminating sender-level delivery bottlenecks across international markets.
• Traffic Shaping 
  Traffic Shaping creates dynamic traffic lanes in order to protect your messaging, and allows you to prioritize and categorize your messages by country and sender type to enable more seamless deliverability for your high-priority messages. For example, architecting your messaging solution so that your timely verification (e.g. OTP) messages have prioritized deliverability over your promotional messages to ensure the high-priority verifications are delivered first.
• Insights 
  Insights gives you real-time, out-of-the-box analytics and reporting on messaging deliverability, capacity allocation, and queuing so you have more granular insights into the performance of your global messaging traffic.

Traffic Optimization Engine is ideal if you are growing your messaging solution globally, have encountered messaging delays, long queue lengths for high-priority messages, or want to gain more control of how your messages achieve optimum delivery. Learn more about Traffic Optimization Engine within our Twilio Docs or get started today.