How to Research What People Say on X About a Topic with Grok

The short version

Grok can read through public X posts much faster than you can scroll. xAI says it trained Grok “to find information from deep within X” with keyword and semantic search tools. Use it to find themes, questions and complaints, then read the real posts yourself before drawing conclusions.

Step by step

1. Pick a narrow topic

“Reactions to [your product name]”, “complaints about delivery apps in [city]”, “questions people ask about [service]”. Narrow topics give clearer answers.

2. Set a time window

“Last 7 days”, “since [date]”. Without it, old and new posts get mixed.

3. Ask for themes and examples

Have Grok group what it found into three to five themes, each with one or two example posts and links.

4. Ask how it got there

How many posts it looked at, roughly who was posting (customers, businesses, journalists, bots?) and what it couldn’t find. This tells you how much weight to give the answer.

5. Read the example posts

Open them. Check they say what Grok says they say, and that they’re not all from a handful of accounts.

Prompts to copy

Customer reactions:

Search X for posts about [product or business name] from the last 30 days.
Group them into 3 to 5 themes (praise, complaints, questions), give 2 example posts with links
for each, and tell me roughly how many posts you looked at.

Common questions:

What questions do people on X ask most about [topic, e.g. getting solar panels installed]?
List the top 10 as plain questions I could answer on my website's FAQ page.

Compare two things:

Compare how people on X talk about [option A] and [option B] this month.
A table with: what people like, what they complain about, example post links.

Public account summary:

Summarize what the public account @[handle] has posted about in the last month:
main topics, tone, and 3 representative posts with links.

Example

You: run a cleaning business and are thinking of offering pet-hair removal.

You ask: “What do people on X in [region] say about pet hair and home cleaning? Themes, example posts, last 60 days.”

A good result: themes like “shedding season”, “allergies” and “can’t get it out of car seats”, with links. You notice the car-seat posts and add a car interior option. You don’t treat the answer as a market survey, because most of your customers may never post on X.

Mistakes to avoid

• Treating X as everyone. X users are one group. Your customers may be elsewhere.
• Trusting invented numbers. “62% of people say…” is rarely measured. Ask how it was worked out.
• Not checking for bots and repeat posters. Five accounts posting fifty times isn’t a trend.
• Researching private people. Stick to topics, brands and public accounts that post publicly about their work.

When not to use it

For decisions that need real numbers (pricing, opening a location), run a proper survey or look at your own sales data. Use Grok’s X research to find questions worth asking, not to answer them.

Related: write X posts with Grok and fact-check Grok.