X remains crucial for public relations teams in 2026, primarily for its speed and its unique data feed. The platform carries roughly 550 million users and generated about $1.8 billion in ad sales in 2025, down from Twitter's $4.4 billion in 2022. Despite that decline, X still offers unmatched real-time news dissemination and directly feeds xAI's Grok chatbot, and PR professionals need a presence there for crisis response and media relations.
What does X do for PR teams?
X performs three critical functions that communications teams cannot easily replace elsewhere. It manages the fastest real-time news cycle of any platform. It holds the working relationships PR teams have with reporters and editors. It now feeds Grok, xAI's chatbot, which draws on X's live data stream in ways no other AI engine can match. Teams that dropped X after the ad exodus lost the speed layer, not just an ad line item.
Who needs this guide?
- PR and communications teams: Use this guide for running rapid-response media relations.
- Crisis teams: Apply this guide to monitor and respond inside a news cycle measured in minutes, not hours.
- B2B marketing teams: Refer to this guide for using X for lead generation alongside LinkedIn.
- Agencies: Consult this guide to decide how much of a client's social budget X still deserves.
What is X, and how has it changed?
Twitter rebranded to X in July 2023, following Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition. The platform then moved through a rapid ownership chain: xAI acquired X in March 2025, and SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026. For the Musk side of the story, see Elon Musk's PR strategy. Two changes matter most for a PR team.
Why did advertisers leave X?
Advertisers left X, and most have not fully returned. Ad revenue fell from $4.4 billion in 2022 to roughly $1.8 billion in 2025, a 59 percent decline following the November 2023 advertiser exodus. Brands still running paid X campaigns operate in a much smaller, more concentrated ad marketplace than they were three years ago.
How does Grok use X's live data?
Grok turned X's live feed into AI training and retrieval infrastructure. xAI's Grok chatbot pulls on X's real-time data stream, which means posts on X can surface inside Grok's answers faster than content on any platform without that direct feed.
Which X surfaces matter for a communications team?
- The real-time feed: This is still the fastest place a story breaks or a crisis compounds, hours before most other channels catch up.
- Verified organization and executive accounts: This is the identity layer reporters check to confirm a statement is official.
- Grok: This is X's own AI layer, drawing on the platform's live posts. It is increasingly a retrieval surface brands need to account for, similar to how they account for Google or ChatGPT.
- X Ads: This is a smaller, more concentrated marketplace than 2022's Twitter Ads, covered in detail in the X ad inventory map.
- Account security: SIM-swap and account-takeover risk is a standing operational concern for any brand or executive account with real reach, covered in X account security for 2026.
- Community Notes: Crowd-sourced context can attach to brand statements, executive posts, or crisis claims. Once a note activates, it is mostly outside brand control.
What changed for crisis response on X?
Crisis response on X works differently than it did on the Twitter teams trained on in the 2010s, even though speed still decides outcomes. Verification became a paid product (X Premium), which weakened the blue check as identity confirmation. Gold checkmarks for organizations and gray checkmarks for government accounts add identity layers at a higher cost. Algorithm reach for brand accounts shifted toward paid amplification and verified accounts, and Community Notes added a crowd-sourced check that brands cannot switch off.
What still works: fast, substantive engagement beats flat denial. Executive accounts often travel further than the corporate account. Statements posted as images of formal letters still perform. Coordinating X with LinkedIn, the brand website and other channels typically beats an X-only response. For a worked example of a calm, fact-first response to a false claim, see the Wendy's chili finger hoax case study.
What are the best X plays for PR teams in 2026?
Four strategies cover most of what a communications team needs from the platform today.
Treat X as the fastest crisis lane.
Treat X as the fastest lane in a crisis plan, not the only lane. A story that breaks on X still moves faster than a press release can. Pre-cleared statements and a named spokesperson account ready to post are more valuable than a fast writer scrambling after the fact.
Lock down account security before a crisis.
Lock down executive and brand account security before a crisis, not during one. Passkeys and SIM-swap protection are the baseline. An account takeover during a live news cycle is a second crisis stacked on the first.
Use X for B2B lead generation.
Use X for B2B lead generation alongside LinkedIn, not instead of it. X's B2B audience is smaller than LinkedIn's, but it reaches founders, operators, and journalists who are otherwise hard to reach directly. See the guide to growing an audience on X, including B2B for the founder-led-content discipline, launch playbook and category case files.
Monitor Grok mentions of the brand.
Monitor what Grok says about the brand the same way teams monitor ChatGPT and Claude. Grok's live-feed advantage means it can pick up a story or a sentiment shift faster than AI engines without direct platform access.
What doesn't work on X anymore?
Two habits that used to be safe now carry real risk.
Treating X as a broadcast-only channel
Treating X as a broadcast-only channel no longer works. The audience is smaller and more concentrated than it was as Twitter. A brand posting without monitoring replies or Grok mentions misses where the real conversation about it is happening.
Assuming ad reach matches media-relations value
Assuming the platform's ad reach matches its media-relations value is a mistake. The two are no longer correlated. A brand can gain real crisis and reporter value from X while getting weak returns from its ad account. Budgeting for both the same way misreads the platform.
| Platform |
Best for in PR |
Weakness |
Typical PR use |
| X |
Real-time news cycle, reporter relationships, Grok visibility |
Smaller ad audience, concentrated advertiser base since 2023 |
Rapid response, media relations, live commentary |
| Facebook |
Paid acquisition at scale, crisis response speed, Group retention |
Near-zero organic reach without ad spend |
Brand identity, paid campaigns, crisis protocol |
| LinkedIn |
B2B credibility, executive thought leadership, hiring signal |
Limited consumer reach outside professional contexts |
Executive visibility, B2B lead generation |
| YouTube |
Buyer-intent search, long-form authority, AI transcript citation |
Slow to build, requires sustained production |
Category authority, creator partnerships |
Most communications teams keep X for its speed and reporter access. They run paid acquisition through Facebook and Instagram. B2B lead generation relies on a mix of X and LinkedIn, depending on the audience. For the text-first alternative, see Threads, Meta's X alternative.
How is X changing communications teams' work?
The X account itself got riskier, and the audience got smaller. However, the reason to stay did not disappear: nothing else matches X for the speed a story or a crisis moves at. What changed is the operating discipline underneath it. Account security, Grok monitoring, and a pre-cleared crisis stack are now standard practice in a way they were not on Twitter in 2019.
Explore the cluster
This guide is one node in EPR's practitioner-guide series covering how communications teams actually use each major platform and AI engine in 2026:
Conclusion
X's public relations value survived its ad revenue collapse because speed and reporter access never depended on ad spend in the first place. Teams that dropped the platform entirely after 2023 gave up the fastest lane in their own crisis plan.
