With the Super Bowl just around the corner, brands are once again racing to dominate one of advertising’s biggest stages. Every year, companies pour millions into commercials designed not just to sell products, but to spark conversation, go viral, and win cultural bragging rights. And for years, Twitter played a major role in measuring which ads actually landed.
Now, with Twitter officially rebranded as X, the platform is trying to reclaim that cultural relevance with something new: Brand Ranx, a real-time tracker designed to measure how Super Bowl ads are performing based on what people are saying on the app.
It’s essentially a revival of Twitter’s old “Brand Bowl,” but updated for the X era, and positioned as a way to show which campaigns are generating the most buzz, engagement, and emotional response during football’s biggest night.
Emmanuel Umahi
What Is X Brand Ranx?
Brand Ranx is a live leaderboard that tracks Super Bowl ad performance using conversations happening directly on X. Instead of relying on surveys, ad recall studies, or next-day media reports, the system pulls from real-time discussion, showing which brands people are talking about most, and how they’re reacting.
Tap into any brand’s listing and you’re taken directly to its X profile, where you can see how users are engaging with the campaign in the moment. The idea is simple: if people are discussing it, resharing it, or reacting emotionally to it on X, then it’s resonating, whether positively or controversially.
The world’s most buzzworthy ads are getting ranked during the biggest game of the year.
— Business (@XBusiness) January 25, 2026
Meet X BrandRanx—powered by Grok and real-time conversation on X, turning live audience reactions into brand rankings during the moment everyone will be talking about.
While X no longer holds the same cultural dominance it once did under the Twitter banner, it still claims hundreds of millions of users and remains one of the fastest platforms for real-time reactions, especially around live events like sports, politics, and entertainment.
Brand Ranx ranks campaigns across four main performance categories, all powered by user activity and sentiment on X.
One category focuses on which ads are most loved, using sentiment analysis to track positivity around a campaign. Another measures which ads are most talked about, highlighting brands generating the most discussion volume. There’s also tracking for which ads are most shared, showing which campaigns users are actively reposting. Finally, there’s a category for Most Disruptive, Outside TV, spotlighting brands that dominate Super Bowl conversation without even running a traditional commercial during the broadcast.
These categories closely mirror Twitter’s old Brand Bowl metrics, signaling that X is positioning itself as a cultural scoreboard for major advertising moments — not just a social feed.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
The Super Bowl has always been about more than football. It’s one of the few moments where advertising becomes entertainment, with viewers actively waiting for commercials instead of skipping them. In the past, Twitter became the place where people immediately reacted to ads praising the funny ones, roasting the awkward ones, and turning standout moments into memes.
Since the rebrand to X, the platform has struggled to maintain that same cultural centrality. Brand Ranx looks like an attempt to reclaim its role as the real-time pulse of pop culture moments, especially around live television events that still generate massive simultaneous audiences.
By surfacing engagement data directly on-platform, X is also reminding advertisers that it remains a key space for campaign amplification, trend creation, and conversation tracking even as brand budgets increasingly shift toward TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and creator-driven formats.
Jemi Motesho
Even if X isn’t as dominant as Twitter once was, Brand Ranx still offers something valuable: a fast, unfiltered snapshot of how people are reacting emotionally to ads in real time. Unlike traditional brand studies that take days or weeks, this tracker shows who’s winning attention during the moment and who’s getting ignored.
For advertisers, it’s a way to benchmark performance against competitors almost instantly. For fans and media watchers, it offers a cultural scoreboard of which Super Bowl commercials actually broke through the noise.
That said, how representative X’s audience is of the broader public remains open to debate. But as one data point among many especially for live reaction and meme-driven virality Brand Ranx still carries weight.
The Takeaway
X’s launch of Brand Ranx signals a renewed push to position the platform as the real-time scoreboard for culture, conversation, and advertising impact starting with the Super Bowl. While the app may no longer dominate online discourse the way Twitter once did, it still captures immediate reactions better than most platforms, especially during live events.
For brands, Brand Ranx offers instant feedback on what’s landing and what’s not. For viewers, it adds another layer to Super Bowl Sunday turning commercials into a live competition for attention, emotion, and internet dominance.
Whether Brand Ranx becomes a staple or a one-off experiment, it’s clear X wants back into the business of measuring what the internet is talking about and the Super Bowl is its biggest test yet.
Emmanuel Umahi
