Grammarly’s “expert review” is missing the real experts

A feature recently added to the Grammarly aspires to improve user writing with the help of the world’s great writers and thinkers — as well as some tech journalists.

Started in August 2025 As part of a broader set of AI-powered features, Expert Review appears in the sidebar of Grammarly’s main writing assistant, allowing users to report review suggestions “from the point of view” of subject matter experts.

Marked wired that Grammarly frames this feedback as if it came from well-known authors, whether they are living or dead. In some cases, according to The Vergeit may even appear to come from tech reporters at The Verge, Wired, Bloomberg, The New York Times, and other publications.

Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about TechCrunch? I copy-pasted an early draft of this post into Grammarly in the hopes that I might see some advice from my TC colleagues, but I was told to add moral context like Casey Newton, to “leverage the anecdote to align the reader” like Kara Swisher, and to “raise the bigger question of accountability” like Timnit Gebru.

Something that was rather disappointing: Yes, the feature seems poorly designed, but if all these other pubs will be listed so what are we doing wrong?

Anyway, to state the obvious, none of these figures appear to be involved in Expert Reviews or have given Grammarly permission to use their names. Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Grammarly’s parent company Superhuman, told The Verge that these experts are cited “because their published work is publicly available and widely cited.”

And in this user guide for operationsays Grammarly, “References to experts in Expert Review are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.”

Which is reasonably clear, I suppose. But it begs the question: In what sense does Grammarly actually provide an “expert review”? Perhaps not at all, as historian CE Aubin told Wired: “These are not expert reviews, because no ‘experts’ are involved in their production.”