TikTok non-Spark ad captions: no links, @ or hashtags, lint first

Before you paste ad text into a non-Spark TikTok ad, strip the links, the @ symbols, and the hashtags. TikTok's auction in-feed page says non-Spark captions are white text and support no clickable links, symbols such as @, or hashtags; Spark Ads instead extract the caption from the organic video, to a maximum of 4 lines (read 2026-10-07). A ten-line Python lint catches both rules.

This is about the ad's caption field in TikTok's tools, not about text burned into the video. Sume does not push ads to TikTok in the docs I read.

The two caption rules

From the auction page, which also lists .mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .3gp, up to 10 minutes, a 500 MB cap, and a 516 kbps floor for non-Spark ads.

A caption linter

The checker flags a URL, an @, a hashtag, or more than four lines. It flags only; it does not rewrite your copy. Note that # can legitimately appear in text like "#1 pick", which the page's hashtag rule would probably still catch, so the lint errs on the strict side.

import re


def lint_caption(text, spark=False):
    problems = []
    if spark:
        if len(text.splitlines()) > 4:
            problems.append("more than 4 lines")
        return problems
    if re.search(r"https?://|www\.", text):
        problems.append("link")
    if "@" in text:
        problems.append("@ symbol")
    if "#" in text:
        problems.append("hashtag")
    return problems


for t in ("Spring sale ends Friday", "Shop at www.example.com #sale"):
    print(repr(t), lint_caption(t) or "ok")

Where Sume text fits

If the words must be in the picture, video captions burns them into pixels: style values include slam, punch, and tiktok-green, a job is $0.20 for videos of 60 seconds or less, and cues let you author overlay text with no speech recognition. Burned-in text is part of the video file, so the caption field's link and hashtag rules, as written on the page, do not describe it. The page does not say anything else about it either.

Keep the legal or disclosure line out of a hashtag or a tiny overlay; that is outside this post's sources.

What this lint does not cover

The page says nothing here about length in characters, emoji, or line breaks for non-Spark text, so the lint stays silent on them. A separate post in this catalog covers character budgets from another TikTok page; check that one if you need numbers.

Run the lint on every string in the batch, not only the headline. A link buried in the third variant of a ten-ad set is exactly the thing that stalls a whole upload, and a loop over a list costs nothing.