Grammarly's generative writing tool shipped switched off by default

The setup

In 2023 Grammarly added a generative layer, GrammarlyGO, on top of its existing correction engine. The launch page, preserved by the Wayback Machine after Grammarly retired the live URL, describes a beta available to free and Premium individual accounts in nine countries, plus "most" Grammarly Business and Grammarly for Education accounts. The page sets out four subscription tiers by monthly prompt allowance: Free Essentials at 100 prompts, Premium at 500, Business Teams at 500 per user, and Business Enterprise at 1,000 per user. Installing the feature, in other words, was less about downloading software than about which contract a workspace already held.

What the documents show

The archived FAQ states plainly that GrammarlyGO worked inside Grammarly for Mac, Grammarly Chrome, and the Grammarly Editor, reaching into Gmail, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, LinkedIn, and Medium, with a Windows client "soon." On data, the vendor's own answer separates two claims: prompt text and context are "shared with our partners for the sole purpose of providing you with the GrammarlyGO experience," but partners are not allowed to use that data "for training their models or improving their products." That is a vendor claim, not an independently audited one, though it is specific about what is and is not permitted. Grammarly's current business page repeats the underlying claim that the company does not sell or monetize uploaded content, and lists admin controls and SAML single sign-on as standard, without walking through the generative-feature toggle specifically.

The friction

The 2023 FAQ discloses the setup cost directly: GrammarlyGO was "off by default for Grammarly Business and Grammarly for Education customers," and an administrator had to sign in and switch it on for the entire team or institution before anyone saw it. K-12 accounts were excluded outright. A developer-facing version for the Text Editor SDK was still "evaluating" a release, meaning integrations built on Grammarly's API could not assume generative output was available. None of this is friction the vendor hid; it is friction the vendor's own FAQ chose to spell out to administrators before they flipped the switch.

What changed in the work

Editorially, the interesting shift is who made the decision. A spelling-and-grammar checker had been an individual, low-stakes install; a generative co-writer became an organizational choice with a monthly prompt budget attached. By 2026 the parent company had rebranded its AI lineup around a broader assistant called Go, folded into a suite the company now markets under the name Superhuman, a continuity worth noting for anyone tracing GrammarlyGO's lineage forward. The kept element is the prompt-allowance model; the dropped element is the standalone GrammarlyGO brand name.

• Does your plan's prompt allowance match how often people actually draft with it?
• Who in the organization can see and change the admin toggle today?
• What happens to prompt content shared with a vendor's processing partners after the session ends?

Read together, the 2023 launch page and the current business page describe the same trade: broader drafting help, arriving pre-scoped by contract tier and switched off until an administrator says otherwise.