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In my Stack Overflow profile, it says that I've "reached 7.9 million people."

That's very flattering, but how many of those people were just there due to a Google Search, and they happened to land on a page having an answer of mine?

Is there any heuristic that is applied to the "reached" metric to indicate some level of engagement with the post? Are "likes" and upvotes taken into account? Does the post have to be visible on the page?

It says in the balloon for "people reached" that you only count "highly-ranked" answers. What do you consider "highly-ranked?"

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    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/… , if the calculation hasn't been tweaked since then, which I haven't checked. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jul 17 '15 at 18:53
  • My impression is that dividing the shown number by 100 yields something that is more likely to have a correct order of magnitude. – user259867 Jul 17 '15 at 19:56
  • I take that figure with a pinch of salt, as nothing more than "interesting". Perhaps that's unfair of me on whoever dev'd it, but I doubt it's even possible to be accurate to a useful degree. Your up votes are what signifies how many people you've helped really, although even that is not really accurate, given potential upvotes from people going for badges and just because your post was good – James Jul 17 '15 at 22:23
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    You have reached almost the entire populations of Singapore and New Zealand combined – user289879 Jul 18 '15 at 10:05

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