How To Use Grok for Free Automated Research
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The Rundown In this guide, you will learn how to use Grok's Tasks feature. If you have a free X.com account, you get 2 automated tasks each day. You could be using them to build automated daily research briefings pulled from live X data. Who This Is Useful For Anyone with an X account** who wants free automated research without paying for another AI subscription Marketers and founders who want daily or weekly competitor and industry monitoring Sports fans, news junkies, and hobbyists who want timely updates on topics X is great at tracking What You Will Build One or two scheduled Grok tasks that automatically research topics you care about and deliver the results to your email and phone. Read to the end to find out how to get even more automated tasks for free. What You Need to Get Started A free X.com account (that's it) Optionally, the Grok mobile app if you want push notifications on your phone Step 1 Go to grok.com and sign in with your X account. On desktop, they hide this feature a bit. You have two options: Go directly to grok.com/tasks Click on your profile picture in the bottom left corner, then click Tasks in the popup menu Step 2 Click Create Task . You'll see schedule options: daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Pick daily for your first one and write a prompt. Here are some ideas depending on what you care about: Industry trends:** Search X for the top trends in [your niche] from the last 24 hours. Summarize the top 3 and flag anything gaining traction. Competitor monitoring: Search X for any news, product updates, or mentions about [competitor name] from the past 24 hours. Summarize the key findings. Local news: Give me a daily update on local news, events, and weather forecasts in [your city]. Sports: `Search X for injury updates and any roster changes for [your team or league]. Flag anything that happened in the last 24 hours. Think about topics where X has an edge: timely, breaking, real-time stuff that traditional search engines are slow to pick up. Pro tip: You can stuff multiple keywords into one task. If you're tracking your industry, ask Grok to search for news on a few different terms in a single prompt. Grok does thorough research, so one well-written task can cover a lot of ground. Step 3 Before you let it run on schedule, click into the task and hit the Test button. This runs it once so you can see what the output looks like. The test results won't show up in your sidebar automatically. You need to go back to the tasks screen, click on the task, then click Chat to see the output If the results are too broad or too narrow, tweak your prompt and test again Step 4 Once your task is running, Grok will deliver results two ways: Email to the address tied to your X account Push notifications through the Grok mobile app (if you have it installed) You can toggle email and app notifications on or off depending on how you want to receive your briefings. If you don't want another app on your phone, email works fine on its own. To view results on desktop anytime, navigate back to grok.com/tasks and click into the task. Going Further Use your weekly and monthly limits. You get 2 daily tasks for free, but you can also schedule up to 10 weekly or monthly tasks. That's a huge hidden bonus. Set up a weekly competitor roundup on Mondays, a monthly industry trends summary, or a weekly research brief on a topic you're learning about. Mix daily and weekly tasks to get the most out of your free account. Stack keywords across tasks. Use your 2 daily tasks for the topics that change fast (breaking news, sports, market moves) and your weekly tasks for slower-burn research (industry trends, competitor deep dives, product launches). Upgrade if you need more. For unlimited tasks, you'll need SuperGrok ($30/month) or X Premium+ ($40/month). But most people can get a lot done with the free limits.
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