Consensus

Consensus is a search tool built for academic and scientific literature. You ask a question in plain language, and it pulls relevant peer-reviewed papers, summarizes what they found, and links directly back to the sources so you can verify the claims yourself.

The product has evolved since its early days. It launched around the idea of a consensus meter that showed the percentage of studies agreeing with a claim; that feature still exists but is no longer the primary focus. As of October 2026, Consensus describes itself as an AI workspace for scientific research. Recent additions include Skills, four ready-to-run research workflows (Literature Review, Citation Snowballing, Reverse Citation Search, and Verify Citations) that run in Deep mode; the ability to pull figures and tables from cited papers directly into answers; a Research Gaps Matrix; a partnership with AAAS; and a Consensus Everywhere initiative that lets Consensus run inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Deep Search remains a core capability: it breaks your question into sub-questions, runs up to roughly 20 targeted searches, and offers a wide-coverage mode that can scan up to about 1,000 papers. The newer MCP-based integrations extend this into other AI assistants rather than confining it to the Consensus interface.

Pricing has a genuine free tier: basic paper search, 10 Pro messages per month, and up to 3 Deep reviews per month, at no cost. Pro costs $20 per month, or $144 per year if billed annually (about $12/month), and includes unlimited Pro messages, 15 Deep reviews per month, and 500 API and MCP uses per month (extra usage is $0.05/use up to 1,000). A higher Deep plan costs $65 per month, or $540 per year if billed annually (about $45/month), and includes 200 Deep reviews per month plus 2,000 API and MCP uses per month (extra usage is $0.05/use up to 10,000). Consensus offers discounts of up to 40% for students, faculty, and US clinicians with an NPI number. Team and Enterprise plans are also available, though their pricing was not verified.

The limits are worth knowing. Coverage skews toward what is indexed, and some records are abstract-level only; like any AI summarizer, it can flatten nuance, so you still need to read primary sources for anything high-stakes. Note also that an unrelated sales-demo product at goconsensus.com shares the name and costs $600-$1,250/mo; it is not this tool.

It suits researchers, students, clinicians, and analysts who want grounded, citable answers from the literature and are comfortable verifying against the originals rather than trusting a summary at face value.