X's rebuilt ad platform: what changed in 2026

Through 2025, X's message to advertisers was simple: come back. In 2026 it rebuilt what they were being asked to come back to. On 30 April X announced what it called the biggest overhaul of its ad platform in its 20-year history, with ads matched using retrieval and ranking systems from xAI, the AI company that owns it. Most of the year's other changes follow from that.

The year so far, month by month

• February: ads began accepting 4:5 (1440 by 1800) and 2:3 (1080 by 1620) images alongside 1:1, 16:9, 9:16 and 1.91:1, so creative made for Instagram or Pinterest can run without recropping.
• April: the rebuilt Ads Manager, released in phases, with contextual and semantic matching of ads to posts and to people.
• June: a no-code way to set up the X Pixel and Conversions API through Google Tag Manager, Conversions API resources in Events Manager, and live diagnostics of event health.
• July: Grok arrived inside Ads Manager, in beta for selected advertisers, answering strategy questions and suggesting creative. Mentions Boost launched too, letting businesses on Premium Business pay to boost organic posts that mention them, with a button.
• August: lead generation ads returned, with native forms and pre-filled fields, on image, video, carousel and Timeline Takeover ads. An X Ads MCP server lets AI assistants read campaign data, and an API lets brands build chatbot accounts in direct messages.
• September: a Cashtag Partner Program in the US added a trade button to posts about stocks and crypto.

Some things stay the same. X still has no minimum spend, the minimum bid is one US cent, and dynamic product ads and the Conversions API remain available.

Boosting posts other people wrote

Mentions Boost lets a brand promote a post in which a customer or creator mentions it. Trade reports say the person who wrote the post is not paid, and X has not explained how consent or labelling will work. Until it does, treat it like any other use of someone else's content: get their permission in writing, pay creators for usage as you would for any ad, and make sure the boosted post is labelled as an ad.

What X says about brand safety

Grok is now X's brand safety layer. X's brand suitability playbook, reported in March 2026, says Grok reviews posts for suitability and that profile ads run only on profiles Grok has vetted. X claims brand safety above 99 percent and suitability above 97 percent, citing combined data from X, IAS and DoubleVerify. IAS extended its measurement to X profiles in January 2026, and DoubleVerify measures in parallel.

What X does not sell is advertising inside Grok's answers. SpaceX's listing document in May 2026 described such ads as a possible future opportunity and said advertisers cannot currently buy placements in Grok. Articles claiming Grok ads are live are wrong.

The ad business, in X's own figures

Because X is now part of SpaceX, which publishes accounts, its ad business is easier to see. X's ad revenue was 710 million dollars in the first half of 2026, down from 870 million a year earlier, and 367 million in the second quarter, against 426 million. SpaceX's listing document put X's 2025 ad revenue at 1.8 billion dollars and its monthly users at 550 million in March 2026, and blamed the first-quarter dip on the platform rebuild.

Advertisers remain split. In January, X's head of advertising, Monique Pintarelli, said 97 of its top 100 advertisers had returned; Sensor Tower data in the same Digiday report found only six of the top 100 spent more in 2025 than in 2022. A deck leaked in March offered returning advertisers 50 percent added value, up to 200,000 dollars each. Kantar's 2025 survey found a net 29 percent of marketers planned to cut X spend in 2026. X's lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers was dismissed in March 2026 and settled in July.

Reading it from the Gulf

X's reach in Saudi Arabia is still large. DataReportal's reading of X's ad tools at the end of 2025 put it at about 15 million people, 43 percent of the population, against about 2.85 million in the UAE, though both fell 6 to 7 percent over the year. The Cashtag Partner Program is US only. X has not said where its other new features are limited, so check what your own account offers before planning around them.

For a brand advertising on X in the region, four steps follow:

• Reuse 4:5 creative from other platforms instead of recropping it.
• Set up the Conversions API through Google Tag Manager, and check event health before launch.
• Try lead generation ads, particularly for B2B, real estate and education.
• Agree brand safety settings with whoever runs your account, and record them in the campaign notes.

It also pays to see an ad in the X timeline, website card and all, before it runs. If you would like help shaping an X campaign around these changes, the ALXO team is always happy to talk.