Consensus is an academic search engine that finds, ranks and summarizes peer-reviewed research and returns answers with inline citations. It searches 400M+ peer-reviewed papers and scholarly works indexed from sources including Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, PubMed and publisher feeds. Licensed full text comes from publishers including Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage, ACS Publications, the American Psychological Association, De Gruyter Brill and AAAS. Consensus was founded in 2021 by Christian Salem and Eric Olson. Over 170 university libraries partner with Consensus for student and faculty access. Its homepage names institutions including Michigan, Rice, Virginia, Carnegie Mellon, Kansas, Texas A&M, William & Mary, Vanderbilt, McGill, Cardiff, Lucerne and Virginia Tech.
The Consensus Meter answers a yes-or-no research question by showing whether the evidence leans toward Yes, No, Possibly or Mixed. Deep Search builds its own search strategy, expanding key terms, identifying conflicting arguments and exploring the citation graph to produce a literature review. The Research Agent plans and runs multi-step research tasks with tools such as semantic search, DOI look-up and citation graph traversal, and shows a trace of each step. Medical Mode narrows results to about 50,000 clinical guidelines and 8M articles from the top 1,000 medical journals, and Citation Grounding maps every AI citation to an exact quote from the paper.
Consensus publishes an MCP server at mcp.consensus.app/mcp, which its documentation calls the recommended surface for any LLM client, naming Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT, and a REST API with the same primitives. It is available as an app inside ChatGPT and Claude, and since September 2026 inside Microsoft 365 Copilot through the Microsoft Marketplace. Zotero libraries can be imported into the Consensus Library, which also takes uploaded documents and supports shared collections, and citations export as BibTeX, RIS and EndNote.
Pricing is in US dollars, and the pricing page has a monthly and annual toggle with Individual and Team and Enterprise tabs, showing annual prices by default. Free includes basic paper search, 10 Pro messages and up to 3 Deep reviews per month. Pro is $12 per month billed annually ($144 a year) or $20 month to month, with unlimited Pro messages, 15 Deep reviews and 500 API and MCP uses a month. Deep is $45 per month billed annually ($540 a year) or $65 month to month, with 200 Deep reviews and 2,000 API and MCP uses. Teams is $20 per seat per month billed annually or $30 month to month, for up to 200 seats, with 50 Deep reviews, centralized billing and 500 API and MCP uses. Enterprise is priced by quote and adds SAML single sign-on, library integration and dedicated support. Students and faculty with a school email and US healthcare professionals with an NPI number can get up to 40% off.
API and MCP use beyond the included amount costs $0.05 per use, up to 1,000 uses a month on Pro and Teams and 10,000 on Deep. Deep review volume separates the plans: 3 a month on Free, 15 on Pro, 50 on Teams and 200 on Deep.
Consensus suits researchers, students and clinicians who want answers drawn from the peer-reviewed literature, and university libraries providing that access to students and faculty. Researchers running a full systematic review with screening and data extraction should also look at Elicit. Those checking how later papers cite a specific finding should look at Scite.ai, and those whose questions reach beyond academic papers should look at Perplexity AI. Those who need a cited report across the open web, filings and official statistics, with each claim checked against its source, should look at Hyperresearch.
Current state Q4 2026: Consensus added a Research Agent, Citation Grounding and shared Library collections during summer 2026, opened its API and MCP server to all users, and launched an app for Microsoft 365 Copilot in September 2026. It announced content partnerships with AAAS in September 2026 and with the American Society for Microbiology and Rockefeller University Press on 1 October 2026. On 5 October it introduced Skills, ready-to-run workflows for reviewing a field, tracing citations, finding evidence for a claim and checking a draft's sources. On 27 October it made the Research Agent available through the API and MCP as Threads, which returns a cited synthesis with supporting quotes. Its privacy policy states that it does not use customer data to train AI models, its own or any third party's, and names OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Baseten as service providers that process content. The same policy states that Consensus is not subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Consensus publishes no third-party security certification.
