X adds Grok-powered custom timelines with 75+ topics

If your X feed has felt like an endless firehose of outrage and irrelevant viral posts lately, you are definitely not alone.

Now, X is overhauling its core timeline experience. The company just rolled out Grok-powered Custom Timelines, pitching it as one of the platform’s biggest updates ever. In short, you can now pin dedicated niche feeds straight to the top of your home tab alongside the standard feeds.

Grok reads the room, not just hashtags

Custom feeds themselves aren't new—Bluesky has made them a core selling point for a while. But X says its approach skips old-school keyword and hashtag filtering entirely.

Instead, Grok reads and interprets every single post across the platform to apply semantic topic tags. Combined with your existing engagement history, the feed personalizes itself around what you actually want to see. Head of product Nikita Bier noted that the feeds perform significantly better for subjects you already interact with.

X launched with more than 75 topics spanning tech, finance, anime, gaming, and specific sports like Formula 1. Predictably, there are also dedicated buckets for Elon Musk's pet interests, including robotics, space, and biotech.

On the news front, the top suggestions lead with the Iran conflict, crime, and elections. TechCrunch tested the news feeds and found a broad spread of commentary and reporting from outlets ranging from Reuters and Bloomberg to The Atlantic and Al Jazeera, without an obvious partisan tilt.

Out with Communities, in with new ad slots

To set these up, iOS users can swipe right past "For You" and "Following," hit the plus button, and choose up to 10 custom timelines or lists to pin to their navigation bar.

For now, the feature is exclusive to paid Premium subscribers across all tiers on iOS, with Android support coming soon. At the same time, X confirmed it is shutting down X Communities, abandoning the declining group feature in favor of these automated algorithmic hubs.

There is also an unmistakable revenue play here. Testers noticed that the second post in every single custom feed is an ad. That gives X a fresh injection of contextual ad inventory, arriving just as reports continue to swirl about the platform’s struggling ad revenues since Musk took over.

Why it matters

For power users, this is the cleanest way in years to tame X's chaotic main feed. If you only care about AI research or Premier League highlights, pinning dedicated tabs saves you from endless doomscrolling through trending political drama.

From a platform perspective, this is a clever technical integration. Following xAI's acquisition of X last year, using Grok’s semantic horsepower to organize content gives xAI a real consumer showcase while opening up lucrative, highly targeted ad real estate for brands.

That said, we think replacing community-led moderation with an AI curator carries real risks. When Grok gets to decide what counts as "news" or "tech," any algorithmic bias or hallucination directly distorts what millions read, trading human community governance for an AI-filtered walled garden.