How to Use Grok: A Practical Walkthrough
Quick answer
Sign in at grok.com or in the official iOS and Android app and type what you want - or use Grok inside X. Turn on the web and X search tools when you need current information, because Grok has no knowledge of events beyond its training data unless those tools are enabled.
Using Grok is not complicated, but most people use a fraction of it. The gap is almost always the same one: search tools left off, and a task re-explained from scratch every session. Both are fixable in minutes.
Getting in
Pick your route first, because they are separate products. Grok.com is the standalone assistant in a browser. The iOS and Android apps give you the same assistant on a phone, with conversations and settings syncing once you sign in.
Grok in X is the third option — fewer features than the standalone assistant, but it can read and work with posts on X directly, which the other two cannot do as naturally.
If you are building rather than chatting, that is the xAI API at api.x.ai/v1 with an API key, not any of the three apps.
The setting that changes the most
Search tools. xAI's documentation is explicit that Grok has no knowledge of current events or data beyond its training data, and that realtime data requires enabling the server-side Web Search or X Search tools.
This is the single highest-value thing to understand about using Grok well. With search off, you are talking to a model recalling its training. With search on, it is looking things up. The interface does not make that distinction obvious, and it is the difference between an answer you can use for anything time-sensitive and one you cannot.
The practical habit: if your question contains a date, a price, a version number, or the word 'latest', turn search on before you ask.
Prompting it without wasting turns
State the job, the constraints and the output shape in one message. 'Rewrite this for a non-technical reader, keep it under 150 words, no bullet points' gets there in one turn; a vague request gets a generic answer you then have to steer three times.
Ask for the reasoning separately when you are checking work. If you want to verify an answer, ask it to show the steps or the sources rather than asking 'are you sure' — the second question invites agreement, not evidence.
And if the answer matters, ask it what would change its mind. It is a fast way to surface the assumption the whole answer rests on.
When a bot beats plain Grok
If you find yourself pasting the same preamble into Grok — the same role, the same rules, the same output format — you are doing a bot's job manually.
A Grok bot is that preamble saved and given a link. The creator defines the persona and the rules once, and anyone opening the link gets the configured assistant instead of a blank prompt. For a repeated task, that is the difference between re-explaining and just working.
Use plain Grok for thinking through something new. Use a bot for the tasks you already know the shape of.