Grok 4.6 vs Grok 4.7: Web and X Search in One Chat

Grok 4.6 was xAI's flagship chat model for about five weeks. If you typed "Grok 4.6" into Google, the short answer is: it's been replaced, and the thing that still makes any Grok model worth opening is X search — the ability to read live posts, threads and accounts on X instead of waiting for a web page to get indexed. Here's what changed, what X search actually gives you, and how to run it in Plurel.

What Grok 4.6 was, and why you're reading about Grok 4.7 now

xAI, which rebranded to SpaceXAI following its acquisition by SpaceX, released Grok 4.6 on 12 August 2026, a new flagship large language model built for long-running agentic work and more ambitious interactive and visual tasks. It carried a 500,000-token context window and a knowledge cutoff of 1 February 2026, and it was priced from $2 per million input tokens.

That didn't last long as the top Grok. Elon Musk's xAI released Grok 4.7 on Monday afternoon, its best model to date, calling it "a notable improvement over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed." It shipped on September 21, 2026, with a larger base model and a longer reinforcement-learning run, and — importantly for anyone comparing prices — it landed at the same $2 input / $6 output per million tokens as its predecessor. Grok 4.6 still exists in some developer tools and API routes, but it's no longer the model xAI points people to for everyday use, and it's not the model running in Plurel. Plurel runs Grok 4.7.

If you came here specifically to confirm Grok 4.6 is real and dated correctly: yes, it launched August 12, 2026, matched GPT-5.6 Sol on third-party benchmark aggregator Artificial Analysis, and was itself a fast follow-up to Grok 4.5. None of that changes the practical answer for 2026: use the newer model.

The one thing Grok does that most chat models don't: X search

Claude, GPT and most other chat models can search the general web. Grok can do that too, but it also has a second, separate tool built specifically for X (formerly Twitter). The X Search tool enables Grok to perform keyword search, semantic search, user search, and thread fetch on X (formerly Twitter). That's four distinct ways to pull from the platform, not one generic lookup:

• Keyword search — finds posts matching specific words or phrases, useful for tracking a term as it spreads.
• Semantic search — finds posts that mean the same thing even when the wording is different, useful for gauging a reaction to an event rather than a single phrase.
• User search — pulls up what a specific account has posted, useful for checking what a company or public figure actually said.
• Thread fetch — reconstructs a full reply thread, useful when the context is spread across several posts rather than one.

In plain terms: a general web search tool tells you what articles exist about a topic. X search tells you what people are saying about it right now, in their own words, including replies and corrections that never get written up as articles at all. That matters for breaking news, live sentiment, product launches, sports results, or anything where the "ground truth" is a conversation happening in public rather than a published page. Grok 4.7 is SpaceXAI's frontier model built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, and lists function calling, web search, X search and code execution among its tools.

Why this is different from a model just "knowing about X"

Older chat models answer from training data, which has a cutoff date. X search is a live tool call during the conversation — Grok goes out, searches X at the moment you ask, and brings results back into its answer. That's the same mechanism as web search, just pointed at a platform most general web crawlers don't index in real time.

Grok 4.6 vs Grok 4.7 at a glance

Do it in Plurel

1. Open the chat or go straight to https://plurel.tech/?model=grok-4-7.
2. Pick Grok 4.7 from the model switcher if it isn't already selected. It costs 1 credit per message.
3. Ask your question plainly — you don't need to say "search X" every time; Grok decides when a live search helps. If you specifically want current reactions rather than articles, say so: "Check what people are posting on X about [topic] in the last few hours, not news articles."
4. For code, attach a file or paste a snippet and ask it to run or debug — Grok 4.7 has a code sandbox alongside its search tools.
5. If the conversation turns into needing a picture or a video, switch to Claude Opus 5 or GPT-6 Astra in the same chat window — those are the models in Plurel that can plan and price an image or clip for your approval before spending credits. See Best AI Image Generator in 2026 or Best AI Video Generator in 2026 for which model to pick once you're there.

Signing up is free, no card required, and chat is included with every account.

Tips and troubleshooting

Be specific about "X" vs "the web" if it matters to your task. Grok will often blend both, but if you need live platform chatter specifically — not think-pieces about the chatter — ask for posts, replies or a specific account by name.

Don't expect image or video output from the Grok chat itself. In Plurel, that planning ability sits with Claude Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra; Grok 4.7 is for search, reasoning, code and files. Open Image or Video directly if that's the goal.

If an answer feels stale, ask it to re-check. Live search tools only run when the model decides they're needed; explicitly asking "search X again for the latest" forces a fresh pull rather than reusing earlier context.

Long documents still work the same way. Grok 4.7 is built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, so attaching a file and asking for a structured breakdown, or asking it to produce a PDF summary, uses the same chat window and the same per-message credit.

Grok 4.6 answered the question of what xAI could ship in five weeks; Grok 4.7 is the one actually worth opening, and it's already waiting in your chat.