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Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine built on a database of over 220 million peer-reviewed research papers. Unlike general AI tools, every response is tied back to a real research paper. Think of it as an AI-native alternative to Google Scholar with a more refined corpus. Consensus is a search engine, not a chatbot. For every query it first retrieves the most relevant papers, then uses AI to analyze the top results and synthesize the findings. Every response includes citations, so each insight is one click from the original source. Over 10 million researchers, clinicians, students, and professionals use it. It’s free to start.

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What you can do with it

  • Answer a research question with a cited synthesis across the strongest papers, plus a Consensus Meter showing where the evidence leans on yes/no questions.
  • Go deeper on hard questions with Deep Search, a longer, more robust version of a search that runs up to 20 searches in parallel and reads 50 to 100 papers.
  • Chain research tasks together with Research Agent: citation crawling, author search, comparison tables, gap analysis, and filters stated in plain language.
  • Read the full paper, not just the abstract. Through publisher partnerships and open-access PDFs, Consensus analyzes methods, results, and discussion sections. See Full text access.
  • Organize and search your own papers in Library, including uploads and Zotero imports.
  • Explore how papers connect with the Citation Graph.

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Three ways to use Consensus

Web app

Search, Deep Search, Library, and Citation Graph at consensus.app.

MCP

Search from inside Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any MCP client.

API

One REST endpoint for your own apps, agents, and pipelines.

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Search modes

Switch the corpus between All (220M+ papers), Medical mode (~8M papers and 50,000 clinical guidelines from the top 1,000 medical journals), and My Library.

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How Consensus removes hallucinations

  • AI runs after search, not instead of it. Models only summarize the papers that were retrieved; they don’t fill in blanks with outside knowledge.
  • Relevance checkers gate every answer. Separate models verify that a paper actually contains information relevant to the query before it’s used. If nothing relevant is found, Consensus says so.
  • Every statement is traceable. Hover a citation to see exactly where in the paper it comes from, then click through to the passage. See Citation Grounding.
  • Retracted papers are flagged with a RETRACTED badge and never used in analyses.
  • Your data isn’t training data. Consensus doesn’t use your data to train models or share it with third parties. Uploads are private to your account.

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Plans

Paper search is unlimited on every plan. See pricing for details, and help.consensus.app for account help.

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Next

Where do papers come from

The sources behind the 220M-paper index.

How search works

Hybrid retrieval, quality re-ranking, and grounded synthesis.