X Will Give Brands Lower Ad Rates for ‘Aesthetic’ Ads Free of URLs, Emojis

X is incentivizing advertisers to ditch emojis, hashtags, and links in their ad copy with lower rates on ads for what the company’s head of Americas, Monique Pintarelli, calls “beautiful” ads. The company advised in an updated ad quality policy this week that ad copy avoid hashtags, symbols, and grammatical errors. The policy also suggests that ads include no more than one emoji, except in the Japanese and Korean markets. Plus, visual media included in ads should not be “gimmicky, excessively cropped, or indecipherable,” according to the new policy. X will begin assigning an “aesthetic score” to every ad on the platform based on how well it adheres to the new guidelines. Ads that are more closely aligned to X's "aesthetic" values will cost less and be featured better in user feeds, the company said. “The industry has lost its way with things like chasing clicks and gaming algorithms, and, in the process, is creating low-quality, spammy-type advertising in pursuit of those things,” Pintarelli said. “We're dedicated to ultimately building a better user experience, and at the same time, a better brand opportunity to connect with our users in a more elegant fashion.” This "aesthetic" rating is part of X’s broader ad quality score—which evaluates engagement rates, recency, and relevance—and will be considered in the weighting of ad prices. That means that ads X deems aesthetically valuable will have access to lower CPMs in the ad auction, while ads that defy the guidelines will come at a higher price tag and will also be algorithmically suppressed in user feeds, according to Pintarelli. “If your ad is not as good and you want to break through, it's going to cost you more to do so,” Pintarelli said. For now, the policy serves as guidance rather than strict rules for advertisers, though X said it planned to implement tighter restrictions on ad creative and copy over time. Ads will also now include an AI-powered ‘Explain this post’ button. Users can click this button in the upper righthand side of the post to get additional information generated by Grok, xAI’s flagship chatbot. For ads on the site, this tool can serve as a fact-checking mechanism, scanning the advertiser’s website and sources from the web to help verify specific claims—though Grok's accuracy has been inconsistent in the past. X is increasingly integrating AI into its advertising products. In February, the company debuted a handful of generative AI-powered creative and measurement tools for advertisers. This followed the October 2024 launch of X’s overhauled ads experience, designed to supercharge targeting with AI. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, the company's ads business—previously the engine that generated 90% of the app’s revenue—has suffered as brands cut spend over content concerns. Big brands including Apple, Comcast, and Disney pulled their ads from the platform in 2023, and users have reported feeds filled with low-quality crypto ads and ads for explicit games. Pintarelli said that the changes to X’s ad quality policy are “absolutely not” a response to accusations of low-quality advertising on the site, but said, “On X, we believe that filtering out these spammy ads is a good thing for our users.” X’s advertising business remains well below pre-Musk levels but has shown signs of recovery. The company’s global ad revenue is projected to reach $2.46 billion in 2025, a 16.5% increase from the previous year, according to eMarketer. Still, that figure represents just 55% of its 2021 revenue of $4.46 billion.

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X Will Give Brands Lower Ad Rates for ‘Aesthetic’ Ads Free of URLs, Emojis

Brands will be subject to a new scoring system based on the appearance of their ad copy and ad creative on X

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Kendra Barnett

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