• by Colin Kirkland , July 31, 2025

With the goal of boosting brand performance, X is revamping the appearance and functionality of its in-stream ads.

The social media company recently cut hashtags and emojis from paid promotions, and continues to refine its ad formats, which it says will be “sleeker,” blend naturally into users’ timelines, and depend more heavily on AI.

To maximize “unregretted user minutes,” X says it is now responding to user feedback by changing its ad policies, demanding advertisers follow new rules attempting to produce “crisp, captivating, and genuinely resonant” ads void of “unnecessary clutter or distractions.”

Some of X’s new ad requirements include the restriction of hashtags or urls in ad text, the limitation of one emoji per ad (unless brands are “targeting Japan and/or Korea”), and the avoidance of images, video or animations that are “gimmicky, excessively cropped, or indecipherable.”

Following owner Elon Musk’s publicly shared beliefs on the issue (he has called hashtags “an aesthetic nightmare”), X has yet to produce any hard data supporting its claim that these changes will boost brand performance on the platform. 

However, despite the absence of performance data, the company hints at charging advertisers more for their X campaigns, saying that “assigning each ad an aesthetic score” will ultimately “influence its pricing.”

X also says that these new changes aren’t “just about looks.” Using machine learning, the company claims that its large-language model Grok will provide brands with enhanced insights into campaign performance, plus AI-powered ad copy generation.

If the company has updated its ad system, it has yet to explain how exactly, but stated that it plans to integrate Grok’s “Explain this post” feature to ads on the platform as a way to provide users with more information about the brand and its products.