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Every claim in a Consensus answer is tied to a real paper. Citation Grounding goes one step further: it shows you the exact passage in that paper that supports the claim. It’s a verification layer. Rather than asking you to trust AI search on faith, Consensus lets you check the evidence behind each sentence in seconds.

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How it works

  • Hover a citation to see the quote from the paper that supports the statement.
  • Click the quote to open the paper at that exact passage, in its original context.
  • Open the Evidence tab on a paper to see every quote Consensus pulled from it for your search.
Grounding works best on papers where Consensus has full text. Through publisher partnerships (Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, ACS, APA, AAAS, Oxford University Press, and others), open-access PDFs, and your own uploads, Consensus can look beyond the abstract to find the supporting passage. See Full text access.
A Consensus answer with a citation card showing the quoted sentence from the paper, next to the paper's PDF with that sentence highlighted

Hover a citation to see the supporting quote; the paper opens at the highlighted passage.

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Reading the signals

The Citations panel in a thread lists every paper cited across the conversation.
A Pro answer with a citation card open showing the Used full text badge

Click a citation to open its card. USED FULL TEXT means the passage came from the full paper, not the abstract.

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Where it appears

Citation Grounding applies to AI-generated answers in the Consensus web app: Pro messages and Deep searches. The MCP server and API return paper metadata and key takeaways rather than per-claim quotes.

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Why it matters

Consensus is built on a simple rule: if the system can’t ground an answer in real evidence, it won’t make one up. Citation Grounding makes that rule visible. You can audit any sentence, catch a paper cited for something it never claimed, and move from an answer to the primary source without leaving the page.
Combine Citation Grounding with a citation verification workflow to audit an entire bibliography.

Full text access

How Consensus reads paywalled papers.

Research Agent

The agent that produces grounded answers.