What's the Character Limit for X (Twitter) Ads?

X (formerly Twitter) ads follow the same 280-character limit as organic posts. That usable space effectively drops to 257 characters whenever your ad includes a link, because X always counts a URL as exactly 23 characters toward the limit regardless of how long or short the actual link is.

How the Count Actually Works

• 280 characters total — the base limit for the text of a promoted post, identical to an organic post.
• 23 characters per link, always — every URL in the post body consumes exactly 23 characters of the limit, whether it's a short link or a long one, leaving 257 characters for everything else when one link is included.
• Text, spaces, punctuation, emoji, and hashtags all count toward the 280-character total.

What Doesn't Count Toward the Limit

Media attachments — images, video, and GIFs — don't consume any of the 280-character allowance, and neither does a Card attached to the post or the content of a quoted post. This means a promoted post with an image and a short caption has effectively its full character budget available for the caption itself, since the visual asset sits outside the text limit entirely.

Separate Limits for Headline and Description Fields

Beyond the core post text, X ad formats that use a website card or similar unit add their own fields with separate limits: a media headline capped around 70 characters (with roughly 50 recommended for full display across devices), and a description field under the headline supporting up to roughly 200 characters. These fields are independent of the 280-character post-body limit and don't borrow from it.

Why This Trips Up Advertisers Coming From Other Platforms

Meta and Google ad formats generally give primary text a much higher technical ceiling with a separate, shorter "recommended" display length. X's limit works differently — 280 characters is both the technical maximum and the only limit, with no larger ceiling behind it, so there's no equivalent of writing long and letting a platform truncate for you. Advertisers porting copy over from a Facebook or Google campaign often have to cut it down rather than simply paste it in.

Bottom Line

Draft X ad copy against a 257-character budget by default if a link is going in the post, since that's the real constraint once the flat 23-character link allowance is subtracted from the 280-character total.

Source: X Help Center, ad copy and character-counting documentation for promoted posts.