I didn’t ask to be called The Grok. The name found me.

It started in the late ’90s, when my brother Jeffrey and I were doing work that didn’t yet have a name. These days, people call it conversion rate optimization, customer journey mapping, or customer experience design.

But back then, we just focused on helping businesses stop losing customers they didn’t even realize they were losing.

People would watch me break down a webpage or campaign and ask how I knew what was going wrong. The answer was always the same. I could feel it. Not just see it—feel it. Like I was walking through the experience as if I was the customer.

Eventually, someone said, “You really grok the customer.”

That word, grok, comes from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand something so completely that the line between you and it disappears. Not logic. Intuition. Connection.

And just like that, the nickname stuck.

So when Jeffrey and I launched our marketing newsletter, we named it GrokDotCom. That was in the year 2000. We used it to teach marketers how to think more like their customers. We wrote about reducing friction, increasing flow, increasing relevance, and motivating persuasion. It was one of the first newsletters of its kind. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were laying the groundwork for what would become the digital customer experience movement.

Years later, in April 2007, I joined a small platform called Twitter. It had launched a year earlier, in 2006. I claimed @TheGrok because, by then, that name had followed me through client meetings, speaking engagements, books, interviews, and everything else.

That handle was just the most honest shorthand for how I work.

Last year, Shelley Walsh interviewed me for her Pioneers of Digital series. She asked about the name, the origin story, and the work that grew from it. We talked about the early days of GrokDotCom, about Future Now, Inc., and about how customer empathy is still the most overlooked force in marketing. Over the years, i’ve been referenced as The Grok in interviews, in writeups in publications like Forbes, and even in other people’s presentations.  

That brings us to the strange part.

Recently, someone tried to update Grokipedia, which currently lists “@BryanEIsenberg” with my public profile on X (formerly Twitter) to confirm that I still actively use @TheGrok. Which I do. That’s been my handle since 2007. It’s in the header of my personal site. It’s linked in interviews. It’s cited in my books.

The edit on Bryan Eisenberg’s page was rejected by Grokipedia.

Yes, the chatbot built into X, named Grok, rejected an update about The Grok because it claimed the supporting evidence came from an AI and might be “hallucinating.”

You can’t make this up.

The irony? I’ve been using that handle longer than Grok AI has existed. Longer than the company calling itself X. Longer than most marketers have been measuring bounce rates (a term Jim Novo and I coined).

I wasn’t chasing a brand identity. I was just doing the work.

And the work hasn’t changed. Whether we call it persuasion architecture, buyer legends, or conversion optimization, it always starts with the same question:

What does your customer need right now, and what’s getting in their way?

Answer that, and you’ll know what to fix. You’ll know how to communicate. What story needs to be told. You’ll know how to help.

I’ve built entire careers, frameworks, and companies around that principle. And I’ve taught others to do the same. Not because it’s trendy, but because it works.

If you want to grow, grok your customer.

Don’t settle for what you think they want. Walk their path. Feel their friction. Align your message with their intent. You don’t need an algorithm to validate it. Your results will do that for you. And if an AI can’t recognize it?

That’s fine. Your customers will.