SpaceX's IPO filing in May gave the clearest Grok numbers yet. Grok had about 117 million monthly users in March 2026, out of 550 million on X. That's about one X user in five.
A few months later, a Max Planck Institute study looked at what those users actually see. In real chats donated by Grok users, the app read about 41 search results for each prompt and cited 0.7 of them. ChatGPT cited four.
Those two facts frame every other number in this roundup of Grok statistics. Grok has a large audience, mostly inside X, and it sends that audience to very few web pages. Here's everything we could verify, with sources and dates, plus our own check of how search demand for Grok has moved.
Grok statistics at a glance
| Statistic | Figure | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | About 117 million | SpaceX IPO filing, March 2026 |
| X users | 550 million, up from 520 million | SpaceX IPO filing, March 2026 |
| Share of X users on Grok | About 21% | SpaceX IPO filing |
| SuperGrok paid subscribers | About 1.9 million | SpaceX IPO filing |
| X and xAI paid subscribers | About 6.3 million | SpaceX IPO filing |
| US adults who have used Grok | 8% | Pew Research Center, Feb 2026 survey |
| Share of AI chatbot site visits | 2.8%, down from 3.8% in January | Similarweb, May 2026 |
| US app users, year on year | +117% | Similarweb, 2026 report |
| Citations per answer in the app | 0.7, against 4.0 for ChatGPT | Max Planck Institute study, Sept 2026 |
| Worldwide Google searches for "grok" | 13.6 million a month, from 30.4 million | DataForSEO, Sept vs March 2026 |
How many people use Grok
The SpaceX filing, covered in detail by Social Media Today, put Grok at about 117 million monthly active users as of March 2026. X itself had 550 million users, up from 520 million in December 2025. So roughly 21% of X users used Grok.
For scale, that's well behind the leaders. OpenAI reported more than 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users by late September, and Sensor Tower counted 662 million monthly app users for Gemini and 245 million for Claude in May. Grok's 117 million is closer to Claude than to Gemini, but measured monthly rather than weekly.
US surveys put Grok ahead of Claude, though. Pew's February 2026 survey found 8% of US adults had used Grok, against 6% for Claude, 24% for Gemini and 44% for ChatGPT. Grok's built-in place in X gives it reach that a standalone app has to earn.
Growth is real but slowing in places. Similarweb's 2026 report on generative AI measured US monthly Grok app users up 117% year on year. That's faster than ChatGPT's 87% and Gemini's 31%, but well behind Claude's 349% and Meta AI's 435%.
How many people pay for Grok
The filing also gave the first official subscriber count. About 1.9 million people paid for SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy or SuperGrok Lite. Another 4.4 million paid for X Premium or Premium+, for about 6.3 million paid subscribers across the two products.
That's under 2% of Grok's monthly users paying for a Grok plan. Social Media Today noted that fewer than 1% of X's users pay for X Premium. Subscriptions to X and Grok grew by $365 million in 2025, according to the filing.
The pricing is changing. Bloomberg reported in late September that SpaceX was considering a single four-tier plan across Grok and X. It would run from a free tier with tight limits up to a $100-a-month Ultra plan that includes Grok Bot, the agent product xAI launched in August.
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X reach: the audience Grok sits on
Grok's biggest advantage is where it lives. The filing describes Grok as powered by real-time data from X, and says X sees about 350 million posts a day. Those posts are both Grok's training data and a source for its answers.
That reach depends on X itself, and outside data suggests X is shrinking. Social Media Today reported that X's latest EU Digital Services Act disclosures showed further user declines. Similarweb estimated X had about 302 million mobile monthly users and 123.7 million daily users in June 2026, well below the filing's 550 million, though Similarweb's figures cover only app activity.
X's ad business points the same way. The filing showed $1.8 billion in ad revenue for 2025, against $4.4 billion for Twitter in 2022, the last full year before Musk took over. The filing also said SpaceX doesn't currently sell ads in the Grok API.
For brands, the point is simple. Grok's audience is mostly X's audience. If your buyers spend time on X, Grok matters more to you than its 2.8% share of web visits suggests.
Grok's share of the AI market
On the web, Grok is a small and shrinking player. In Similarweb's data, reported by PPC Land, Grok had 3.8% of visits to AI chatbot sites in January 2026, 3.7% in March and 2.8% by May. Claude passed it on the way up, going from 2.0% to 8.9% over the same months.
In apps, Sensor Tower put Grok with the other smaller assistants at under 5% of AI assistant app users in May. Downloads tell a similar story. In the 13 days after Meta launched its Muse app in September, Sensor Tower counted about 200,000 Grok downloads, against 400,000 for Claude and 3.1 million for ChatGPT, as CNBC reported.
Statcounter, the most quoted source for AI referral share, doesn't track Grok at all. Our AI chatbot market share analysis compares Grok with the other four big chatbots across every measure we could find.
Search demand for Grok has halved
We checked how often people search Google for Grok, using DataForSEO's monthly search volume estimates for October 2025 to September 2026. Grok's peak came early in the year, and the decline since then is steep.
| Month | "grok" | "grok ai" | "claude" | "perplexity" |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| October 2025 | 13.6M | 4.09M | 7.48M | 30.4M |
| January 2026 | 30.4M | 11.1M | 11.1M | 13.6M |
| March 2026 | 30.4M | 11.1M | 45.5M | 13.6M |
| June 2026 | 16.6M | 5.0M | 68.0M | 9.14M |
| September 2026 | 13.6M | 4.09M | 68.0M | 9.14M |
Worldwide monthly Google search volume, DataForSEO estimates, pulled October 19, 2026.
Searches for "grok" more than doubled from October to January, held at 30.4 million through March, then fell back to 13.6 million by September. That's where they started. Over the same year, searches for "claude" grew about ninefold, from 7.48 million to 68 million.
These are Google Ads estimates, which come in rounded bands, so treat them as direction rather than precise counts. But the direction is clear. Interest in Grok spiked in early 2026 and faded, while interest in Claude kept climbing.
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How Grok searches and cites
For anyone who wants Grok to mention their website, this is the most important section. In September 2026, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems published a study of web search by ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek. It drew on real chat histories donated by more than 600 users, about 100 of them Grok users, plus controlled tests through each company's API.
In real chats, Grok was the busiest searcher and the stingiest citer.
| Platform | Searches per prompt | Results read per prompt | Citations per answer | Share of results cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok | 4.55 | 40.7 | 0.7 | 1.8% |
| ChatGPT | 3.07 | 43.2 | 4.0 | 13.3% |
| Claude | 1.80 | 16.6 | 3.5 | 19.9% |
| DeepSeek | 2.63 | 14.4 | 4.9 | 34.1% |
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, "Characterizing Web Search by Conversational LLM Agents", real-chat data.
There's an important twist. When the researchers called Grok-4.3 through the API, it cited 25.5% of its results, with 5.7 citations per answer. So the low count is how the Grok app presents answers, not a limit of the model. Users of the app see far fewer links.
The study also found Grok's search results lean heavily on a few domains. The top 10 domains made up 32.3% of everything Grok's search returned in real chats, and reddit.com and youtube.com dominated both Grok's and ChatGPT's results. Our post on Grokipedia and where AI engines cite from covers the other source xAI built for Grok.
Where Grok's answers come from
The same study has a few more details that matter for anyone writing content Grok might read.
Grok searches in wide parallel bursts. It sent a median of four searches per prompt, the most of the four platforms, and fired them at the same time rather than one after another. Each search returned about nine results, fewer than ChatGPT's 14, so Grok makes up for a thin result list by searching more often.
It also adapts its searches more to what it finds. The researchers saw that ChatGPT and Claude mostly rewrote their searches based on the conversation so far. Grok leaned on the search results themselves as well, so a strong page it reads early can shape the searches that follow.
And it rarely cites from memory. In the study's data, only 14 of Grok's 3,916 citations came from the model's own knowledge rather than a search, and all of those pointed to x.com and one other site. When Grok does cite something, it's almost always a page it just found.
How Grok's fetcher behaves
One more thing site owners notice. In an r/SEO thread this month, a developer set up secret URLs for each AI assistant to see which ones respected robots.txt. They reported that each time they asked Grok to open a page, 9 to 12 different IP addresses hit it, 59 over six requests. All of them claimed to be Chrome or Safari, and none read robots.txt.
made secret urls to see which AIs actually respect robots.txt. grok showed up from 59 ips dressed as chrome
so after seeing all the "are AI bots ignoring robots.txt" threads i wanted to actually test it instead of guessing from logs. the problem with guessing is anyone can set any user agent, and a lot of these fetchers don't come from published...
It's one person's small test over a single day, and they said so. But it explains why Grok visits are hard to spot in logs. If that holds more widely, a visit from Grok can look like ordinary browser traffic from residential networks, and user-agent filters won't catch it.
Grok's year in dates
The numbers above make more sense against the timeline. Here are the dated events we could confirm.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| October 27, 2025 | Grokipedia launches with 885,279 AI-written articles | xAI launch coverage |
| January to March 2026 | Worldwide Google searches for "grok" peak at 30.4 million a month | DataForSEO |
| March 2026 | Grok reaches about 117 million monthly users | SpaceX IPO filing |
| May 2026 | Grok-4.3 released through the API | Max Planck study, model table |
| May 2026 | Grok's share of AI site visits falls to 2.8% | Similarweb |
| August 11, 2026 | xAI launches Grok Bot, its always-on agent product | xAI announcement |
| September 30, 2026 | Bloomberg reports a planned four-tier Grok and X plan | Bloomberg |
The pattern is a product that grew fast inside X, peaked in search interest early in 2026, and is now betting on agents and a new pricing model to grow again.
Grok Bot and the agent push
Grok Bot is xAI's newest product, and it's a different kind of usage. xAI describes it as a team of always-on agents that each have their own cloud computer, sign in to apps and websites, and keep working when you step away. It's aimed at sales outreach, marketing campaigns, operations and bug fixes, not at answering questions.
Early numbers are still thin. Seeking Alpha reported in September that Grok Bot passed 400,000 users in its first month, citing an outside report rather than an official figure. Elon Musk posted in late August that the free usage limit had been reset for Grok Bot users, which suggests the free tier was being used up.
For site owners, Grok Bot matters for the same reason as the fetcher test above. Agents that browse with their own computer visit pages the way a person does. That traffic is hard to label in analytics, and it won't show up as a Grok referral.
What these numbers mean for your brand
Grok is easy to dismiss on the web numbers alone. It has under 3% of AI site visits, isn't tracked by Statcounter, and its app cites fewer than one source per answer. Its referral traffic to your site will be small.
But it reaches about 117 million people a month, mostly on X, and more US adults have tried it than Claude. When it answers a question about your category, it names brands whether or not it links to them. That makes Grok a visibility question more than a traffic question, and the only way to see it is to check its answers.
Two practical steps follow. First, if your buyers are on X, your presence there feeds the data Grok draws from. Second, track what Grok says about your category alongside the other engines. Many AI visibility tools don't track Grok. RankControl's AI visibility tracking checks 50 buyer questions every week across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Google AI Mode. Our guide to tracking AI visibility across all six engines covers doing it by hand.
Grok numbers to use
| If you're writing about | Use this figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Grok's audience size | 117 million monthly users | SpaceX IPO filing, March 2026 |
| Paying users | 1.9 million SuperGrok subscribers | SpaceX IPO filing |
| US reach | 8% of US adults have used it | Pew, Feb 2026 survey |
| Web traffic share | 2.8% of AI chatbot site visits | Similarweb, May 2026 |
| Citations | 0.7 per answer, 1.8% of results | Max Planck Institute study, Sept 2026 |
Quote the date with each number. Grok's figures move fast, and its official numbers now come from SpaceX's filings.
What this takes to track by hand
Checking Grok by hand is the same work as any engine. Run your 20 most important buyer questions, note whether your brand is named and which sources appear, and repeat weekly, since answers vary. That's about an hour a week for Grok alone, and five or six hours across all six engines.
You can do all of that manually. Or RankControl's agents can do it for you every week, checking six AI engines including Grok, writing and publishing the pages buyers search for, and reporting what changed, while you focus on your product.
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