Elon Musk has said that X will begin showing ads in responses from Grok, the AI chatbot built into the platform. Speaking with advertisers during a livestreamed Q&A on Wednesday, Musk explained that this move is part of a wider effort to use artificial intelligence to improve X’s ad business and generate new revenue.

“Our focus thus far has just been on making Grok the smartest, most accurate AI in the world, and I think we’ve largely succeeded in that,” Musk said during the conversation, as reported by the Financial Times. “So we’ll turn our attention to how do we pay for those expensive GPUs.”

According to Musk, X will allow advertisers pay to be featured in Grok’s answers when users ask specific questions. “If a user’s trying to solve a problem [with Grok], then advertising the specific solution would be ideal at that point,” he said.

Ad automation, improved targeting, and a checkout feature may follow

Musk also discussed how xAI will support broader ad tools for the platform. He suggested a future where advertisers can upload creative and let Grok handle the rest, from targeting to campaign optimization.

“Grok is good enough for advertisers to be able to upload an ad and do nothing else,” Musk said. This reflects similar automation goals from competitors like Meta, which has said it will let AI handle the entire ad process next year. 

X is also looking to improve how it targets video ads. Roman Grachev, who leads X’s advertising engineering team, said during the call that the platform is “heavily leaning into short-form video” and that targeting capabilities will improve with a new AI training model.

In-app checkout is also on the roadmap. Musk hinted at a feature that would let users make purchases directly inside X.

A response to X’s declining ad business

The announcement comes as X continues to lose ground in digital advertising. In recent years, X has faced a steep decline in advertiser trust and spending. Since Musk’s takeover, the platform has struggled to retain major brand clients, and the recent departure of CEO Linda Yaccarino has added more uncertainty around its ad leadership.

Musk’s pitch — combining Grok’s AI capabilities with deeper ad integration — seems aimed at reversing that trend. However, the company faces strong competition from Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI in the race to define how advertising fits into conversational experiences.

Perplexity, for example, is testing “sponsored follow-up questions” in its chatbot, and Google is pitching an “Ads in AI Mode” feature that targets users based on full chat history, not just keywords.

That’s a fundamental shift in how ad matching works, and Musk could take a similar approach with Grok. “We’re actually now finally showing people ads that meet their interests,” Musk said, adding that ad targeting will keep improving “as we further leverage the Grok AI.”

Musk did not provide a timeline for when ads would start appearing in Grok’s replies, but he plans to win back advertisers. His goal is to “overcome the curse of Twitter” preventing users from buying “a single thing because the advertising system never actually showed the participants what they wanted.”

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