Consensus

What is Consensus?

Consensus is an AI-powered search engine that retrieves and synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed scientific research papers, built by Consensus Inc. The platform uses machine learning to extract key claims, methodologies, and conclusions from academic literature, then surfaces relevant results ranked by research quality and relevance rather than citation count or publication date.

Users query Consensus using natural language—questions like "Does caffeine improve focus?" or "What are the side effects of metformin?"—and receive direct answers backed by citations to specific studies. The engine identifies consensus across multiple papers on the same topic, showing where research agreement exists and where findings diverge. Each result includes the abstract, key findings, study design, sample size, and a link to the full paper. The platform covers journals across life sciences, medicine, psychology, environmental science, and other STEM fields, drawing from hundreds of millions of indexed articles. Consensus serves academic researchers, medical professionals, students, journalists, and anyone seeking evidence-based answers to factual questions. The platform integrates with Perplexity AI and is available as a browser extension and web application.

The freemium pricing model offers limited free searches monthly; paid subscriptions provide unlimited research access, advanced filtering by study type and publication date, and priority processing. Consensus does not charge publishers or researchers to be indexed. The core product directly competes with traditional search engines (Google Scholar) and academic databases (PubMed, Web of Science) by emphasizing question-answering over document browsing, reducing the time users spend reading full papers to find answers.

Similar tools include Elicit, which uses AI to extract and compare research data, and Scholarcy, which auto-summarizes academic papers using neural networks. Semantic Scholar (from Allen Institute)