Is X advertising still worth it?

Nine months ago, we looked at whether X advertising still made sense and landed on “it depends on your audience.” A lot has happened since then, and none of it simplifies the answer.

If you are the marketer who revisits this question every budget cycle, you already know the feeling. Every year brings a new round of “X is back” headlines alongside a new round of advertisers quietly pulling out, and it is genuinely hard to tell which trend is real. Most of the statistics circulating about X right now come from SEO blogs that copy numbers from each other, so even the research part of this decision has gotten harder.

Here’s what we can verify. X’s ownership changed twice in the past year, its longest-serving CEO left without a clear replacement, advertiser trust data moved in the wrong direction, and a serious new brand-safety incident emerged that most 2025 analyses (including ours) could not have accounted for. Let’s walk through what changed and what it means for your budget.

X’s ownership just got a lot more complicated

When we wrote about X last year, the platform was owned by X Corp, which xAI had acquired in March 2025 in an all-stock deal valuing X at $33 billion, according to Wikipedia’s entry on X Corp. That was already one layer removed from the “Musk bought Twitter” story most marketers had in their heads.

It’s now two layers removed. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock transaction that CNBC reported valued the combined business at $1.25 trillion, which CNN described as the largest private merger in history. Elon Musk framed it as building a single vertically integrated company spanning AI, rockets, satellite internet, and social media. By May 2026, xAI had reportedly ceased to exist as a separate company, with X and its Grok chatbot folded directly into SpaceX.

Why this matters for your budget: X’s advertising business is no longer being run or evaluated as a standalone media company. It’s a small piece of a much larger empire whose priorities are AI compute and a pending public offering, not advertiser relationships. That changes how much attention and investment your account team is likely to get.

Leadership tells the same story. Linda Yaccarino, the ad executive Musk brought in specifically to rebuild advertiser trust, stepped down in July 2025 after two years in the role, one day after a Grok update generated antisemitic content. No like-for-like successor has been named. Industry analysts told Yahoo Finance that X may not need a traditional CEO at all going forward, since Musk has always been the real decision maker and the platform’s priorities have shifted toward AI. If your ad rep relationship depended on Yaccarino’s advertiser-facing team, that structure is gone.

The trust numbers moved the wrong way

This is the update that should carry the most weight in your decision. Kantar’s Media Reactions survey, which has tracked marketer and consumer sentiment across roughly 27 markets since 2020, found in its 2024 wave that only 4% of marketers considered X brand safe, against 39% for Google, and that a net 26% planned to cut X spend in 2025 (the largest single-platform pullback Kantar had ever recorded), according to Campaign Asia’s coverage of the report.

If your 2025 planning used that 26% figure, it’s already out of date and not in the direction anyone at X would want. Kantar’s 2025 wave, published in September, found the net figure had climbed to 29%, with nearly one in eight surveyed marketers planning to leave the platform entirely, and X ranked last among all global media brands for marketer trust for the third year running, per Marketing Week’s reporting. WARC’s analysis of the same data points out that marketers’ trust in X ads has fallen from 22% in 2022 to 12% by the most recent reading, with budgets shifting toward TikTok, Amazon and Netflix instead.

There’s a structural reason this keeps getting harder to fix. In 2024, X sued the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, the industry body that sets shared brand-safety standards, over an alleged advertiser boycott. That lawsuit made it financially impossible for the organization to continue operating, according to reporting cited in Wikipedia’s entry on Linda Yaccarino. One of the few remaining paths back to advertiser trust, an independent standards body both sides recognized, no longer exists.

Agency leaders are blunt about where this leaves brands. One strategy director told PR Week that ad-adjacency risk on X is a risk most marketers are unwilling to take, full stop. Digiday’s two-year retrospective on the acquisition found that a senior ad executive would need to see real growth and genuinely new formats before reconsidering, and that political sensitivities alone keep some brands out regardless of performance.

A brand-safety variable nobody had priced in

None of this accounts for the newest problem. In January 2026, X’s Grok chatbot was used to generate sexualized images of real people without their consent, including, in some documented cases, children, triggering investigations from regulators in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, India and Malaysia, according to CNN’s reporting at the time. The European Commission ordered X to preserve all related internal records through the end of 2026 as part of its investigation, and the Associated Press reported that restrictions X introduced in response did not satisfy European regulators.

Separately, Wikipedia’s entry on X notes that French authorities raided X’s offices and issued an arrest warrant for Musk in February 2026 over alleged violations of the EU’s Digital Services Act, and that a Federal Court of Australia ruling the same year fined X Corp for failing to fully comply with a child-safety transparency notice.

We do not yet have a clean, post-incident version of the Kantar survey to tell us how this specific event moved advertiser sentiment. That is a genuine gap, not something to guess at. What we can say is that most major brands did not pull spend during the incident itself, so the near-term financial impact on X appears to have been limited. Whether it shows up in the next trust survey or in your own legal and brand teams’ risk tolerance, it is worth watching closely before you commit next quarter’s budget.

What history says about platforms in this spot

X is not the first platform to face an advertiser exodus over brand safety. In 2017, YouTube’s “Adpocalypse” saw major advertisers, including Procter & Gamble, AT&T, and Verizon, pull spend after ads ran alongside extremist content, and some creators saw revenue drop by as much as 80% overnight, according to research published in Internet Policy Review.

The useful comparison isn’t the crisis, it’s the recovery. YouTube’s parent company treated advertiser trust as an existential issue and responded with refunds, a large expansion of human content moderation and a stricter creator monetization program, rebuilding advertiser confidence within roughly 12 to 18 months. X’s ownership has taken close to the opposite approach: publicly telling advertisers to leave if they didn’t like the platform’s direction, then suing the body responsible for setting the standards that could have brought them back. That is the clearest reason X’s advertiser exodus has now stretched beyond three years, rather than resolving as past platform crises typically have.

So, should you advertise on X in 2026?

Our decision framework from last year still holds up structurally, but the inputs have shifted. Here’s the updated version.

If you land on “stay or test,” our complete guide to X advertising breaks down current ad formats, real costs and campaign setup in detail. If you land on “reduce or pause,” that same guide is worth reading anyway, since it will tell you exactly what you’re walking away from and what it would take to come back.

The numbers don’t lie, and right now they’re telling a more complicated story than either “X is dead” or “X is back.” Treat any single stat you read about this platform with a healthy dose of skepticism, verify it against a named, dated primary source, and revisit this decision in another two quarters. Given how fast this platform’s ownership and leadership have moved this year, waiting a full year to check again isn’t a safe assumption anymore.