Mahnoor Faisal is a tech journalist covering AI and productivity tools with bylines at XDA, SlashGear, MakeUseOf, Laptop Mag, and Android Police.
She's been writing professionally since she was sixteen, and has since penned hundreds of articles. This includes in-depth coverage of AI tools like NotebookLM to breaking news across the AI space. Her passion for technology started when she received her first iPod Touch (4th generation) on her 8th birthday, and she's been deep in the tech world ever since.
Currently pursuing a degree in computer science, Mahnoor brings both a journalist's eye and a technical foundation to her coverage of how AI is reshaping the way we work and learn.
A couple of years ago, the go-to small talk was Spotify or Apple Music, Instagram or TikTok, or whether they're a Netflix or Amazon Prime person. In 2026, the equivalent question is asking someone which AI chatbot they reach for first -- that's a question that actually tells you something about a person today.
While you might've built an AI stack like I have where you use different tools for different use cases, you've surely got one that you just so happen to go to by default. For me, that's currently Claude. Before I switched to Claude, it was ChatGPT. However, there's a single reason why I still open Grok every single day (and it's something that neither Claude nor ChatGPT can currently touch).
Grok's X integration is pretty solid Yeah, I can't believe I'm saying this either
While I don't really think I need to say this, Grok is xAI's AI chatbot, founded by none other than Elon Musk. It launched in November 2023 and has always been baked directly into X (which Musk acquired in 2022 and rebranded from Twitter to X). In Grok's announcement post, the company stated that a unique advantage of the chatbot is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the X platform.
Now, to understand this better, let's look a little at how all the AI chatbots we use work under the hood. They're all trained on massive amounts of data. However, the training has a cutoff date, meaning the model only knows what existed up until the point it stopped training. This is why an LLM will confidently tell you an iPhone that exists (and that you could be holding) does not exist. That's where web search comes in. Chatbots including ChatGPT and Claude are capable of searching the internet in real time to fill in these gaps and bring in fresh information from the web.
Rather than just relying on internal training data from the wider web, Grok takes this a step further by searching X's public posts in real time. So, similar to how all other AI chatbots automatically switch to browsing the web when you ask them for something that requires up-to-date information, Grok automatically pulls from X's live feed of posts in addition to the web. This means it has access to real-time public opinion, breaking news, and trending conversation as it happens.
Social media has always been where the most real-time conversation happens, and I've found that no LLM works as well with social media as Grok. Even Meta AI, despite being integrated into every part of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, doesn't tap into its platforms the way Grok taps into X.
Grok Developer(s) xAI Price model Free, subscription available See at App Store See at Google Play Store See at Grok Expand Collapse This feature works both within X and Grok's standalone app No, you don't need to pay for it
Using the feature is as simple as it gets and doesn't really require any prior setup. All you need to do is head to Grok, and it'll automatically assess whether X posts are relevant to your query and pull them alongside its regular web results. This feature is fortunately not limited to Grok's premium tiers, which makes sense given it's fundamental to what distinguishes the tool as a whole.
In practice, this means I can ask something like "what are people saying about the new iPhone?" and within seconds, Grok will scan real-time posts and opinions. It'll also include citations to the original tweets, so you can quickly verify where it's sourcing the information from. The reason why I find this feature so handy is fairly simple.
When something new drops or a major announcement breaks, the first place people react is always social media. Nowadays, most companies even announce their products and updates on X before anywhere else. Given how much noise is on the platform, being able to get a quick summary of what the overall sentiment around the news at hand is extremely useful.
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Even if there are countless news articles about it from publications, they'll all report on the news and sprinkle in the writer's own opinion. I'm someone who has written countless of these news articles, and I know from first-hand experience that they're all meant to primarily inform you about what happened.
When I want to see what people's reactions are like in real-time, I'll always head to X or Reddit. With Grok, instead of me needing to scroll through hundreds of thousands of X posts (a lot of them being nothing but spam), Grok does the heavy lifting and gives me a sourced summary in seconds.
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Rather than just asking it on the Grok website (which has the traditional AI chatbot experience) or the sidebar tab on X, you can also @grok in any post or thread to get a response right there in your timeline. It's worth noting, though, that this in-thread feature is unfortunately now limited to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers. That said, the only difference here other than getting Grok's response directly in the thread is that it'll automatically use the post you're replying to as context.
At the end of the day, it's still AI
I'm in no way saying I'm ditching all the AI tools I use and moving to Grok. The tool's track record is something I can't, in good faith, fully endorse. However, that's absolutely not the topic of conversation here. I fully believe in giving credit where it's due, and Grok's X integration is genuinely impressive and is a reason why it stays on my daily rotation.
That said, as with every AI feature, it's best to take the results with a grain of salt. The summaries Grok gives you are only as good as the posts it pulls from, and X isn't exactly known for accuracy. Always verify before you take anything at face value.
