A recently-added feature in Grammarly purports to improve users’ writing with help from the world’s great writers and thinkers, and some tech journalists, too. Launched 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. It allows users to bring up revision suggestions from the perspective of subject matter experts.
This feature frames its feedback as if it is coming from well-known authors, whether they are living or dead. In some cases, it can even appear to come from tech journalists at publications like The Verge, Wired, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. Of course, this prompts a question about other outlets. When testing an early draft of this post, the tool suggested tips styled after journalists from other publications but did not offer any modeled after TechCrunch colleagues. The suggestions included adding ethical context like Casey Newton, leveraging an anecdote for reader alignment like Kara Swisher, and posing bigger accountability questions like Timnit Gebru.
That experience was disappointing. While the feature itself seems a bit thoughtless and ill-advised, it feels notable when other publications are referenced and yours is not. To state the obvious, none of these figures appear to be involved in Expert Reviews or to have given Grammarly permission to use their names. A company representative stated that these experts are mentioned because their published works are publicly available and widely cited.
In its user guide for the feature, Grammarily clarifies that references to experts are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with or endorsement by those individuals. That statement is reasonably clear, but it raises a fundamental question. In what sense is Grammarly actually providing an expert review? The answer may be none at all. As one historian noted, these are not expert reviews because there are no experts involved in producing them.