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Elon Musk’s effort to win advertisers back to X has produced evidence of a selective return, not a clear restoration of trust or spending. X says its brand-safety controls are working, and its advertising chief said many major advertisers had returned. But Kantar’s surveys still found weak marketer confidence, while estimates reported in 2026 put spending by a group of major advertisers well below its 2022 level. The key distinction: advertiser presence, ad dollars, brand-safety measurements, and reputation are different things.
What Musk is trying to repair
After Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X, the platform faced advertiser concern about its content environment and the reliability of its brand protections. Musk’s public response has been to argue that X can support free expression while giving advertisers a choice about where their ads appear. Its operational response has focused on placement controls, content screening, and third-party measurement.
At Cannes Lions in June 2024, Musk spoke with WPP CEO Mark Read and acknowledged the advertiser’s choice: “Of course, advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands. That’s totally fine.” Axios reported that Musk recast his earlier profane remark to advertisers as a rebuke to those he believed were demanding censorship. He also argued that X could reach influential people and senior decision-makers.
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The pitch addresses two different concerns: whether an advertiser can avoid specific content and whether the company trusts the platform’s wider environment and governance. Controls may help with the first without resolving the second.
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What X says it has changed
More control over ad placement
X’s October 2023 ownership-anniversary post said the company had introduced Adjacency Controls, Sensitivity Settings, and third-party measurement. X’s current brand-safety documentation describes machine-learning systems and human review for assessing content, along with advertiser controls for placement, sensitivity, and keywords. X also identifies Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify as measurement partners.
These are X’s descriptions of its tools and their performance. A control that filters or measures ad adjacency can answer whether an ad appeared beside content an advertiser has designated as unsuitable. It cannot, by itself, establish whether marketers trust X’s broader content environment, policies, or management.
Platform-reported safety scores
X’s brand-safety page reports a 99.99% average brand-safety score and a 97% average brand-suitability score for 2025 across its third-party measurement partners. In October 2023, X said that “the average brand safety score on X is now >99%, and we are now seeing brand suitability scores at >97% when these controls are applied.” Both are company-published claims about measured ad placements; the 2023 figures specifically referred to cases where advertiser controls were applied.
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Do marketers trust X again?
Kantar’s Media Reactions 2025 release reported that X ranked last among global brands for marketer trust for the third consecutive year. In the same 2025 study, 29% net of marketers planned to decrease spending on X in 2026, and nearly one in eight planned to withdraw their investment entirely. The study release said it interviewed more than 21,000 consumers and about 1,000 senior marketers.
The earlier Kantar findings point in the same direction. In 2024, 26% net of marketers planned to reduce ad spending on X in 2025; marketer trust in X ads fell from 22% in 2022 to 12% in 2024; and 4% of marketers thought ads on X provided brand safety. Gonca Bubani, Kantar Global Thought Leadership Director – Media, explained the concern: “Marketers are brand custodians and need to trust the platforms they use. X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next – it’s difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment.”
| Kantar measure | Finding | What it refers to |
|---|---|---|
| Planned spending, 2024 survey | 26% net planned to reduce spending | Plans for ad spending on X in 2025 |
| Trust in X ads, 2022 to 2024 | 22% to 12% | Marketer trust, as reported in Kantar’s 2024 findings |
| Perceived brand safety, 2024 | 4% | Marketers who thought ads on X provided brand safety |
| Planned spending, 2025 survey | 29% net planned to decrease spending; nearly one in eight planned to withdraw entirely | Plans for X spending in 2026 |
Survey responses are stated intentions, not audited future spending. Even so, they measure something X’s safety-score percentages do not: whether marketers say they trust the platform and intend to allocate budgets there.
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Are advertisers coming back—or spending less?
Those statements can both be true. An advertiser may have an active account, run a limited campaign, or return for a particular event without restoring its previous budget or making X an always-on channel.
In its October 2023 post, X said 1,700 advertisers had returned in the preceding quarter, including 90 of the 100 largest spenders from a year earlier. These were X’s own historical claims and do not establish that the accounts maintained their spending over time.
In January 2026, X’s global advertising head said 97 of X’s top 100 advertisers had returned. Digiday noted that X did not disclose the dollar amounts, a comparison baseline, or how it defined “returned.” The count therefore indicates advertiser presence as X described it, not the value or continuity of those advertisers’ purchases.
A separate estimate gives a more qualified picture of spend. Sensor Tower estimates reported by Digiday found that 64 advertisers from the 2022 top 100 spent on X in 2025, and that this group spent around 50% less in aggregate than it had in 2022. The 97-of-100 claim and the 64-of-100 estimate are not directly interchangeable: they refer to different reporting and measurement, and X did not publish the definitions behind its count.
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Why some brands may buy ads on X anyway
Advertiser decisions can be campaign-specific. Digiday’s June 2026 reporting described major advertisers and categories spending on X again, while an agency executive said clients used it for particular live-event and conference needs. That kind of selective use is different from treating the platform as a dependable, year-round media channel.
Max Willens, eMarketer principal analyst for social media and the creator economy, described the pattern to Digiday in June 2026: “X has been trending toward becoming a platform that brands spend on during certain tentpole moments (the World Cup, U.S. election years, etc.) but no longer treat as an essential, always-on investment,” he said.
Event-based buying can make sense when a platform offers access to an audience gathered around a live moment. It does not show that a brand has set aside concerns about day-to-day adjacency, nor does a handful of campaigns establish a general return to previous spending levels.
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Is Twitter still safe for brands?
There is no single yes-or-no answer that applies to every advertiser. X says it offers placement and sensitivity controls, keyword targeting, and measurement through partners; its reported scores provide one kind of evidence about measured ad adjacency. Kantar’s findings, by contrast, show that marketer trust and planned investment remained weak in its 2025 survey.
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A brand deciding whether to advertise needs to assess its own tolerance for risk, the content categories it excludes, the placements it can control, and whether independent measurement meets its requirements. It should also distinguish a campaign-level suitability decision from an endorsement of the platform’s overall content and governance. The available figures do not establish that X is uniformly safe or unsafe for every brand.
What users think is a separate question
Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey measured views among U.S. X users, not global consumers or advertisers. It found that 87% said people generally feel free to express political views on X. At the same time, 73% said harassment was a problem, including 32% who called it a major problem.
On whether X was good or bad for democracy, 38% of surveyed U.S. users said mostly good, 27% said mostly bad, and 34% said it had no impact. Pew found strong partisan differences in those views. These results show why a single reputation label can obscure competing user experiences; they do not substitute for advertiser surveys or ad-placement measurement.
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Musk’s effort has a coherent two-part argument: X can preserve broad expression while letting brands control the content beside which their ads appear. X has described new tools and published favorable safety metrics, and advertiser presence has returned in at least some forms. But Kantar’s marketer-trust and planned-spending measures remained negative, and estimates reported by Digiday put spending by a set of major advertisers substantially below its 2022 level.
The strongest conclusion is a selective commercial recovery, not a demonstrated reputation reset. Ad accounts returning, dollars returning, advertiser confidence, measured adjacency, and user opinion describe different outcomes—and none alone proves the others.
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