SEO Observations on Grok Web Searches
SEO and AI search are changing rapidly, and the search features that major companies are adding to their artificial intelligence applications are leading this transformation. Google's AI Overview, SearchGPT, and Perplexity searches have now become a common sight. In this article, I want to evaluate xAI's Grok from an SEO perspective based on my own observations. You can think of this as a brief report.
Thanks to its native connection to X, Grok is in a constant state of learning. This allows Grok to adapt to emerging information and trends and provide what I would describe as the most up-to-date responses. It does not yet have a separate mobile application and operates within X. Let’s start with a few general details:
What is Grok?
Grok is an AI chatbot developed by xAI, the company founded by Elon Musk in 2023, and it is integrated into the X (Twitter) platform.
Does Grok have API support?
Yes, https://console.x.ai allows you to sign up and use the Grok API.
Grok can analyze the latest Tweets, news, and discussions to help ensure that its responses are relevant and timely. This is a particularly useful feature in areas such as technology and science. For example, while you might use Google Trends to learn about real-time trends, Grok can help you follow this type of research and news much more quickly:
1. Grok Search Results Are Different from Google’s
First, let’s start with a simple example prompt: “Where can you eat menemen in Samsun?” The “Relevant web pages” section includes many different websites. Of course, the appearance of the sites shown on the right may change over time. They are displayed in a “tile” format, and Grok does not add any parameters to the sites it lists:
In August 2026, however, no sources were cited at all:
The SERP in Google, on the other hand, has a different appearance:
2. Number of Sources
For searches such as “places to visit in Çorum,” we can no longer clearly see relevant web pages or sources in the interface:
In the “thought for 12 seconds” section, news sites are given priority over the TFF:
3. Total Number of Sources
From what I can see, it lists 30+ pages in the Thoughts section. Another page from a site appearing near the top can also show up near the bottom. Paying attention to site favicons is also useful here, as Grok consistently tries to use a favicon:
The Sources section also includes a small number of cited sites:
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4. Description
The app used to display whatever was included in the pages’ meta description field; however, the description is not visible in the current interface. I added an older view below:
5. News Sources
The news results and sites shown in the web pages section do not appear as a separate feature like they do on Google. It first shows an Ankara-specific page from the site and allows users to get information from there. Of course, these results can always change with different prompts and different searches. Please treat what I have written entirely as examples:
When I search using a Turkish prompt, it shows me examples from news sources in the United Kingdom instead of Turkish news sources:
6. Canonical
For example, the canonical section of the page https://www.the-independent.com/topic/french-politics from the sources points to a different site.
It seems that this doesn't cause an issue for Grok, as it lists the source:
A page with a "noindex" tag should not typically appear in Grok results; however, there might be delays in updates due to the system's late refresh.
7. 3XX Redirected Pages
A page that is redirected with a 3XX status still appears in Grok without the final URL. For instance, a redirect added 3-4 months ago may not yet be detected.
In conclusion, I wanted to share my observations on the web results Grok provides from an SEO perspective. The quality of the content presented, the prompt itself, and many other topics could each be the subject of another blog post.
