Grammarly renamed itself Superhuman — and ran into a doppelganger problem

Grammarly, the company millions of people know from its browser extension with writing suggestions, decided to become an AI company — and started by changing its name. In October 2025, it officially adopted a new brand: Superhuman. The name comes from Superhuman Mail, an AI email platform Grammarly acquired shortly before.

The problem is that Superhuman Mail is not just a service. It is a separate brand with a loyal audience, its own reputation, and recognition among professionals. When Grammarly announced the name change, confusion spread online almost instantly: users couldn't tell which company was being discussed. Two entities with the same name started getting in each other's way.

The Verge's Stevie Bonifield called it a "sloppelganger saga" — a pun combining "sloppy" and "doppelganger." The label fits: the rebrand looks like an attempt to take over someone else's identity without working out the details. Instead of a sharp new image, the company ended up with a blurry one.

This isn't the first time a major tech company has used an acquisition as a springboard for repositioning. The logic is clear: Superhuman Mail is associated with productivity, AI, and professional users — exactly the audience Grammarly wants to bet on. But the gap between the strategy and its execution turned out to be noticeable.

Grammarly has existed as a product since 2009. The company grew out of grammar checking and became one of the most widely used browser extensions in the world, with hundreds of millions of installs. In recent years, it has been steadily adding AI features: rewriting, tone adjustment, autocomplete. But in the race against competitors — Notion AI, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini — grammar alone is no longer enough. It needed a new story.

The new story, though, still looks unfinished. Rebranding as Superhuman without clearly separating itself from Superhuman Mail created a communications mess. It's a telling example: at a time when every tech company is rushing to slap an "AI" label on itself, the risk of running into your own doppelganger has become real.

What this means in practice: even a well-funded company with a product used by hundreds of millions of people can botch what seems like a simple move — a name change. A rebrand is more than a logo and a press release. It requires legal clarity, a communications strategy, and an understanding of the associations that already exist in users' minds. Grammarly, by all appearances, didn't finish that work.