On Aug 28, 2026, xAI's official account announced that a Bot can be shared as a template: a public x.ai/bot link that copies a Bot's identity, skills and routines — not its computer and not its logins — so someone else can add a working copy in one click.
The feature is small. Its consequences for the directory layer were not, and they arrived within 48 hours.
What shipped, precisely
The share link carries configuration, not state. Identity, skills, routines travel; the cloud computer and the credentials on it do not. That boundary is what makes the link safe to post publicly, and it is also what makes a template inert until someone connects their own accounts to it. A shared Bot is a recipe, not a running system.
The directory wave
The third-party layer moved the same day. grokbot.dev added /marketplace/, an api/v1/templates.json endpoint and a new "template" item type in its feed on Aug 28, each entry carrying the share_url Add-to-Grok-Bot link, a sharer credit, and faceted tags, with an instruction for syncing bots to name the original sharer. It had shipped a News section, api/v1/news.json and an RSS feed two days earlier, on Aug 26.
grokhub.io had already published a v1 machine contract on Aug 27 — status.json, a lean feed.json covering use cases, plugins, templates and news, per-type detail endpoints, and a Streamable HTTP MCP server at /mcp with search_directory, whats_new and get_entry — then added optional "story" and "images" fields to its detail payloads on Aug 28.
On Aug 29 really.bot, a public log of finished Grok Bot jobs that earn a serial number, shipped its own v1 contract: status.json, a lean feed.json, an /agent consumer contract, and MCP tools returning serial URLs, plus an optional grok_share_url field for runs that have an official share link.
Then Aug 30 brought three at once. Grokyard opened a paid template yard where sellers list public x.ai/bot links starting at $8 and buyers unlock the Add action after paying, with the platform keeping 15% — monetizing, two days later, a feature xAI shipped for free. ShareGrokBots launched scoring live share links against a standard task rather than subjective ratings. gbt.grok.me opened a community desk where people paste share links, rate them, and describe what the Bot actually did; that one is a community report we have not independently confirmed.
The gallery question
As of Aug 29 there was no official xAI template gallery. Reports the same day described a Marketplace tab for installing complete third-party Bots as in preview inside the product, with a Bots tab said to be coming soon; those are preview sightings, not announcements. Assume the gallery is one page away and plan accordingly.
What survives an official gallery, and what does not
Does not survive: a list of share links. If xAI publishes the canonical gallery, it owns discovery, install and the copy count by default — every pure link directory becomes a slower mirror of it. Popularity ranking dies with it, because the first-party surface will have better counts. Paid unlock of a public link is the most exposed of all: Grokyard's 15% sits on top of a free, public URL that the official gallery would list for nothing.
Survives: anything the gallery has no incentive to publish. Verified outcomes — really.bot's serial-numbered run logs — because a vendor gallery does not tell you which templates failed. Independent scoring against a standard task, for the same reason. Machine contracts with stable feeds and MCP endpoints, because agents need to read across sources, not one. Narrative and screenshots of what a Bot actually did. And sharer credit, which is a community norm the gallery is unlikely to enforce.
The short version: the link is a commodity from Aug 28 onward. What people learned running it is not.