Consensus

Consensus is a search engine for academic research. Instead of returning web pages, it searches peer-reviewed papers (the company says more than 400 million of them) and writes an answer that cites the studies it drew from. Ask "does creatine improve memory?" and you get a short synthesis, links to the underlying papers, and, for yes/no questions, a Consensus Meter showing how the evidence splits.

That last feature is what sets it apart from a general chatbot. You can see at a glance whether the literature mostly agrees, and click straight through to the studies instead of trusting a summary.

Main features

• Pro Search and Deep Search modes. Deep runs a longer literature review across many studies.
• Study Snapshots that pull out key findings and the study design for each paper.
• Ask Paper, for chatting with a single paper.
• A citation graph showing how papers relate to each other.
• Collections for organising sources, and citation export to RIS, BibTeX and CSV for reference managers.
• API and MCP access on paid plans, so you can plug Consensus into other AI tools.

Pricing

From consensus.app/pricing, checked October 2026:

Free keeps basic paper search, 10 Pro messages a month and up to 3 Deep reviews.
Pro is $12 a month billed annually ($144 a year): unlimited Pro messages, 15 Deep reviews a month, every research tool, and 500 API/MCP uses a month.
Deep is $45 a month billed annually ($540 a year), aimed at people doing frequent literature reviews: 200 Deep reviews and 2,000 API/MCP uses a month.

Students and faculty with a school email, and US healthcare professionals with a valid NPI number, can get up to 40% off. Team and Enterprise plans are listed separately.

Who it suits

Graduate students, academics, clinicians and science journalists, or anyone who has to back a claim with actual studies. It's less useful for topics that live outside journals, like recent news, product comparisons or legal questions.

What works: answers grounded in peer-reviewed sources; the agreement meter; proper citation export.
What to watch: the free tier's 10 Pro messages go quickly; a synthesis is only as good as the studies it found, so read the key papers yourself before citing them; and coverage is limited to academic literature.

Alternatives

Elicit is the closest competitor for literature reviews. Semantic Scholar is a free academic search engine, scite shows whether citations support or dispute a paper, and Connected Papers maps related research visually.