Grok AI Review: Why Do I Not Recommend to Use Grok AI?

Not every AI tool is worth your time. Some just look good on the surface. That's exactly how I felt after trying Grok AI. It may look fancy, but when you actually use it, things change.

I am not bluffing; I spent some time with it and tested different features myself, but it didn't do much for me.

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This Grok AI review will discuss everything you need to know about it. We will also explore why I do not recommend using Grok AI.

Let's get started!

Part 1. What is Grok AI?

Grok AI is a chatbot that is developed by xAI, a company that Elon Musk started back in 2023. The tool was built to help users get quick answers and offers a real-time interaction with LLM-based AI. On top of that, Grok AI has direct access to X (or Twitter).

The name Grok comes from a famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, meaning deep understanding.

You can access Grok AI via X, the Grok app, and the Grok website. Grok 4.1 delivers greater advancement, higher IQ & EQ, stronger creative performance, and significantly fewer hallucinations. To build this tool, Elon Musk hired experts from top AI companies like OpenAI and DeepMind.

Grok AI At a Glance

Parameters	Grok AI
Parent Company	xAI
Financially backed by	Elon Musk, Space X, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia Captital, BlackRock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holding Company, NVIDIA, AMD
Launched on	November 2023
Number of Users	30 million
Head Quarters	Palo Alto, California
Founders	Elon Musk (founder, CEO), Anthony Armstrong (CFO)
Availability	Available in more than 161 countries
Free access	Supported
Basic Features	Get answers to any question; Generate images and videos; Search the web and X; Coding; Chat with documents, photos or links; Share real-time view with Grok using Voice Mode;

How Many People Use Grok AI?

Here’s a table showing the monthly Grok AI visitors for the past six months:

Month	Visitors
June 2025	110 million+
July 2025	150 million+
August 2025	150 million+
September 2025	150 million+
October 2020	200 million+
November 2025	230 million+

Source: SEMRUSH

Across mid-to-late 2025, Grok AI’s web traffic showed a clear pattern of growth and fluctuation that aligns with its major model releases and feature updates. Starting in June 2025, Grok was receiving over 110 million monthly visitors, and this increased to 150 million+ in July, August, and September, reflecting strong user interest following the launch of Grok 4 and Grok Imagine in July—updates that expanded Grok’s reasoning and multimodal capabilities. Traffic continued to climb later in the year, reaching about 200 million+ in October and 230 million+ in November, indicating that the combined impact of successive releases (such as Grok Code Fast 1 in August, Grok 4 Fast in September, and Grokipedia and Grok 4.1 variants in October–November) helped sustain and grow engagement as the product matured through 2025. This usage trend mirrors reported data showing Grok’s rapid adoption following major model updates and its position as a high-traffic AI tool among generative models during the year.

Here’s a table showing Grok's Progress in 2025:

Month	Release/Milestone
February	Grok 3
July	Grok 4
July	Grok Imagine
August	Grok Code Fast 1
October	Grokipedia
November	Grok 4.1
November	Grok 4.1 Fast

In addition, Grok has been downloaded over 50 million times on the Google Play Store alone. According to AppMagic, over 60 million users have downloaded Grok since its launch.

Now that we know what is Grok AI, let's find out the answer to "Is Grok AI free?"

Part 2. Is Grok AI Free?

Yes, Grok AI offers a free version. But it comes with some limits, which are:

• Send up to 10 messages every 2 hours.
• Analyze 3 images per day.
• Generate 4 images per day.
• Limited access to chat models.

Also, your X account must be at least 7 days old and linked to a phone number to use Grok AI. Now, let's look at how much is Grok AI if you want the paid plan.

Paid Plans

• SuperGrok: Costs $30/month or $300/year. It gives you access to the Grok 4 standard model with extended usage and priority features compared to the free tier. With this plan, you get a larger context memory (~128,000 tokens) that supports longer conversations or large documents, as well as priority voice access, image generation, and premium AI tools beyond what basic users receive.
• SuperGrok Heaby: Costs $300/month or $3000/year. It unlocks access to Grok 4 Heavy, xAI’s most powerful multi-agent model designed for deeper reasoning and higher performance. This plan offers much higher usage limits and a significantly extended context memory (~256,000 tokens), along with early access to new features and the highest priority support and access among the available plans.

Part 3. How to Use Grok AI?

In this section, we will explore how to use Grok AI on different platforms, including web, mobile app, and its official website. Here are the steps for each platform:

Use Grok AI on the Web

1. Open the browser on your desktop or mobile device and search for grok.com.
2. Click the "Sign Up" button in the top-right corner to create a Grok account. If you already have one, you can directly sign in.

3. You can sign up with your X, Apple, or Gmail account.

4. After signing in, you will see this interface. Enter your prompt and hit Enter.

Use Grok AI on the Mobile App

1. First, go to the App Store or Google Play to install the Grok AI official app.

2. After installation, open the app and log in to the account using the given options.

3. After logging in, you will see this chat-like interface. Just ask whatever you want and click the "Enter" icon. You can also change the model from the bottom option.

Use Grok AI on the X (Twitter)

1. Open X in your browser or open its mobile app. Sign in to your X account.

2. After logging in, you will see the "Grok" option in the left panel. Click it.
   You can also open it by clicking the Grok icon on the bottom left. (Only in Desktop)

3. X will open a new window with a chatbot. You can enter your questions here and get answers.

Part 4. Is Grok AI Worth it?

You may wonder, "Is Grok AI good?" I had that same question before trying it. But after using it for a while, the answer became clear.

• 1. Create web presentations

During my graduate studies, I always had to report to my supervisor every week on the papers I had read, highlighting which ones were key papers, what I had discovered and learned from them. I used to spend a lot of time carefully studying the papers and creating PowerPoint presentations to report my findings to my supervisor, so that he would see I had genuinely engaged with previous literature and wasn’t just going through the motions. Now, with Grok AI, the time spent making PPTs has been greatly reduced. I can ask Grok to summarize and distill the essence of a paper, and it will help me create a brief presentation, which I can then polish myself later. This has saved me a significant amount of time.

Sample prompt: I’m currently preparing a presentation for this paper to introduce my reading insights to my supervisor. Could you please help me create a PPT that covers the paper’s research background, research gap, methodology, key results, and conclusion? Aim for about 6–8 slides, each with a bold title and bullet points. Provide mobile-responsive HTML/CSS for the deck.

• 2. Generate infographics from plain text

After using Grok 4.1 to generate a PowerPoint presentation, I usually ask it to help me create an infographic for my research paper as well. Instead of manually designing visuals or struggling to summarize complex ideas on my own, Grok can quickly transform key findings, data points, and research conclusions into clear, visually structured graphics. This not only makes my work more engaging and easier to understand, but also ensures that the core message of the paper is communicated more effectively.

Sample prompt: create an infographic for this research paper.

• 3. Search papers for academic topics

In the past, when my supervisor first assigned me a research topic, I often felt completely lost because I had little to no background in that field. The only thing I could do was search for keywords on Google Scholar to find related papers, but the information I found was usually fragmented and scattered, making it difficult to build a clear, systematic understanding of the topic from the ground up. I wanted to understand how the topic had evolved from its early beginnings to the present, as well as the key challenges and debates that emerged along the way. What I really needed was a tool that could present this entire development process in a structured way, while also supporting it with relevant academic references.

Now, with Grok, this process has become much more efficient. I simply input the topic I want to explore, and Grok automatically retrieves relevant papers, organizes the information, and summarizes the key concepts, milestones, and issues I need to understand. This not only saves me a great deal of time but also helps me quickly build a comprehensive and coherent understanding of an unfamiliar research area, making the early stages of academic research much easier and more approachable.

Sample prompt: What is the dynamic pattern of language learning strategies?

Part 5. Combine UPDF with Grok

There is no doubt that Grok AI is extremely powerful, but based on my experience pursuing postgraduate studies, I still need a tool that supports side-by-side translation, page-by-page summarization, and ask-as-you-read interactions, allowing me to select any text and instantly ask questions. I also need the ability to upload papers I consider important and automatically turn them into a structured literature review. In addition, when studying other researchers’ work, I rely heavily on a solid tool that lets me annotate downloaded PDF papers and take detailed notes, so I can quickly locate key information when I revisit them later.

This is where UPDF fits perfectly into my workflow. UPDF is an AI-powered PDF editor driven by GPT-5 and DeepSeek R1, offering a wide range of annotation tools such as underlining, highlighting, wavy lines, sticky notes, and stickers. These features make reading and organizing academic papers much more efficient.

Even better, I can directly insert infographics generated by Grok AI into my PDFs using UPDF, allowing me to recall the core ideas of a paper at a glance without rereading the entire document.

In addition, after downloading the papers that Grok AI guides me to, I can upload them to UPDF AI Online, which then summarizes these papers into a structured literature review. UPDF AI automatically extracts key points and presents them in a clear, well-organized format. This makes it much easier to compare studies, identify research gaps, and build a solid theoretical foundation for my own work, greatly streamlining the literature review process and improving both efficiency and clarity.

In addition, side-by-side translation and page-by-page summarization are also supported, allowing me to read original texts and their translations simultaneously while quickly grasping the main ideas of each page. This is especially helpful when working with foreign-language papers, as it reduces reading friction and helps me understand complex content more efficiently without constantly switching between tools.

Together, Grok and UPDF complement each other well, significantly improving both my research efficiency and overall academic experience.

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• Fill and sign forms.
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In The End

Wrapping it up! Grok AI is a powerful tool. When combined with UPDF and UPDF AI, it becomes even more effective for handling advanced academic and professional needs. Together, they create a more complete, efficient workflow for research, reading, and writing. You can start with UPDF AI Online’s 100 free prompts and experience how seamlessly it complements Grok to elevate your productivity.