How to get your business recommended by Grok
What the September 2026 AIGROW Index shows about how Grok names businesses, what xAI says about how it reads the web, and the steps that follow from both.
By the AIGROW Team · data under CC BY 4.0
- Answers
- 1,008
- Names per answer
- 3.3
- Repeated when asked again
- 61.1%
- Named by no other assistant
- 29.5%
Grok recommends businesses from what it already knows and, with search on, from what it finds on the web. In the September 2026 AIGROW Index, asked with no web search, it named at least one local business in 23.5% of 1,008 answers, and no other assistant named 29.5% of the businesses it gave. Check each assistant separately.
What the Index shows about Grok
104 pages of the September 2026 edition, each question asked three times, with no web search.
Asked for a local business, Grok named at least one in 23.5% of its answers.
771 of 1,008 answers about local trades named no business. A failed call is not counted as an answer: 0 of 1,248 calls failed. About software, it named no one in 8.8% of 240 answers.
When it named someone, it gave 3.3 names per answer.
Local trades, counting only the answers that named someone. Among the four assistants, from 2.5 for ChatGPT to 5.4 for Claude. About software, Grok gave 3.2.
Asked the same question again, it repeated 61.1% of its names.
Each question was asked three times. For each one, the names that came back in at least two runs, as a share of every name those runs gave. Among the four assistants, from 38.8% for Claude to 61.1% for Grok.
29.5% of the businesses Grok named, no other assistant named on the same page.
109 of 370 different businesses, counted on the pages where another assistant also named someone. Being named by Grok says little about whether the others name you.
How Grok finds businesses
With no web search, Grok can name only businesses it learned about in training, which is what the figures above measure. With search on, it reads the web. What xAI says about that:
- Web search
- xAI documents a web search tool that lets Grok search the web in real time and browse pages.
- Crawler
- The xAI documentation we read names no crawler, so this guide gives no robots.txt rule for Grok.
Sources: xAI, Grok's search tools.
What to do, in this order
The first steps take an afternoon. Getting written about is the slow part, and the one that decides answers given without a search.
The four assistants side by side
The same kinds of questions, asked with no web search. Names per answer counts only the answers that named someone.
What this does not show
- No web search
- Every answer came from what the model already holds, asked with no web search, no location and no chat history. Grok in its own app, with search on, can answer differently.
- A small sample
- Grok was asked on 104 pages of the Index, against 2,400 for the assistant asked most. Its figures rest on fewer answers than the others.
- One month
- These are the figures of the September 2026 edition. A new model can change any of them, and the next edition will show whether it did.
- The maker's words
- What xAI says about how it reads the web is quoted from its own documentation, as read in September 2026. Check it again before you act on it.
Does Grok name your business?
The free scan asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok your own customers' questions and shows who they name instead of you.
Edition September 2026 · data under CC BY 4.0