Is Grammarly Safe to Use? What Actually Happens to Your Text

TL;DR: Grammarly does not sell your content, and says so explicitly. But it does use your text to train its AI models by default on Free, Premium, and single-user Pro accounts — something a lot of people paste reports and emails into daily without realizing. You can opt out in your account privacy settings in under a minute. Enterprise and education accounts have this disabled by default instead. Grammarly holds SOC 2 and ISO certifications, and keeps your saved documents until you delete them yourself.

A Quick Note on How This Guide Was Put Together

I use Grammarly’s free tier regularly for proofreading reports and emails (more on that in how I use it as a non-native writer), so the account settings and opt-out steps below are things I actually went through myself. The compliance and certification details, though, come from Grammarly’s own published trust and privacy documentation rather than an independent audit — I haven’t verified their infrastructure firsthand, so treat those specific claims as “this is what the vendor states,” not independently confirmed.

Does Grammarly Use Your Text to Train Its AI?

Yes, by default, for most account types — and this is the detail most people don’t know until they go looking for it. Grammarly’s own support documentation states plainly: “LLMs are taught using large datasets. In some cases, that includes customer data.” Whether that’s happening to your account depends on account type:

• Free, Premium, or single-user Pro: Enabled by default. You can turn it off yourself.
• Multi-user Pro (purchased via website): Enabled by default. An account admin can turn it off for the whole team.
• Enterprise, Education, or accounts purchased through Sales: Disabled by default, with no toggle needed.

If you’re on a free personal account — which is most people using Grammarly — this is worth actually checking rather than assuming.

How to Opt Out (It Takes About a Minute)

Grammarly calls this the “Product Improvement and Training” control:

• Individual accounts (Free/Premium/single-user Pro): go to account.grammarly.com/security/privacy and toggle it off.
• Team admins (multi-user Pro): the equivalent control is at account.grammarly.com/admin/data_settings.

One caveat from Grammarly’s own documentation: even with this turned off, they may still collect aggregated, de-identified writing statistics for general product improvement. That’s a different thing from your actual documents being used to train a model, but worth knowing it’s not a complete data blackout either.

Does Grammarly Sell Your Data?

No — and Grammarly is direct about this one. Their stated position: “Grammarly makes money when users and customers purchase our paid products, and not by selling or monetizing their content,” and more directly, “we do not and will not sell the content you upload to our products.” This is a meaningfully different question from the AI-training one above — not selling your data to third parties and using it internally to train their own models are two separate practices, and Grammarly does the second by default even though it doesn’t do the first.

Security Certifications

Grammarly states it maintains SOC 2 and ISO certifications, contracts third-party penetration testing firms, and runs regular security reviews across its cloud and corporate infrastructure. These are standard, credible certifications for a company handling this volume of user-generated text — though as with Fireflies’ equivalent claims in our breakdown of Fireflies’ security practices, the certifications confirm a process was followed and audited, not that any specific document of yours was handled a particular way.

Data Retention

Saved documents in the Grammarly Editor stick around until you delete the document yourself or delete your account — there’s no automatic expiration window. If you’ve been using Grammarly for a while and pasted in anything sensitive, it’s worth an occasional pass through app.grammarly.com to see what’s actually still saved there.

Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem

A lot of what people paste into Grammarly for proofreading isn’t casual writing — it’s internal reports, draft emails to clients, cover letters with personal details, sometimes contract language. None of that is a problem if you’re fine with Grammarly’s AI-training default. But “fine with it” should be a decision you actually made, not a setting you never knew existed. That’s really the whole point of this post.

FAQ

If I opt out of AI training, does Grammarly get worse at correcting my writing? No — opting out only affects whether your content is used to train future models. It doesn’t change what Grammarly’s already-trained models can do for your account today.

Is my data safer on paid Grammarly than free Grammarly? Not necessarily on the training question — Premium and single-user Pro have AI training enabled by default just like Free. The real jump happens at Enterprise/Education tiers, where it’s off by default rather than something you have to remember to disable.

Does this apply to everything I type, or just documents I save? Grammarly’s documentation refers to “customer data” broadly for training purposes; the retention specifics above apply to saved documents in the Editor. If you’re unsure whether a specific workflow (like the browser extension) is covered, Grammarly’s own privacy FAQ is the place to check for the most current wording.

Final Thoughts

Grammarly’s actual practices here are fairly normal for the industry — most free AI-powered tools use user data to improve their models by default, and Grammarly at least gives you a real, quick opt-out rather than none at all. The issue isn’t that the setting exists; it’s that most people never see it because it’s not something Grammarly surfaces during signup. If you use Grammarly regularly and haven’t checked your privacy settings, it’s a two-minute detour worth taking.

👉 Check current plans on grammarly.com