Consensus

Overview Consensus is the AI search engine for scientific literature — a Perplexity shaped product built exclusively on top of the peer reviewed corpus. Founded in 2021 by Eric Olson and Christian Salem out of Wharton, Consensus indexes 200+ million research papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed, and adjacent scholarly sources, and answers natural language research questions with citations that all point back to real, verifiable peer reviewed studies. It has become the default "actual literature" tool for researchers, clinicians, graduate students, and any knowledge worker who has to answer "what does the evidence say about X" and cannot afford to accept whatever a general chatbot hallucinates back. What Consensus actually does, cleanly stated, is turn the peer reviewed literature into a conversational research assistant. You ask a real evidence question — "does intermittent fasting improve insulin sensitivity in adults with prediabetes," "how does semaglutide compare to tirzepatide for weight loss maintenance," "what is the current evidence for creatine supplementation in cognitive aging" — and Consensus returns a synthesized answer with a Consensus Meter showing how the evidence distributes across yes / no / possibly, backed by individual paper cards with study type, sample size, and one sentence findings. Every claim is anchored to a specific paper you can click into and read. Every paper card tells you whether it is a randomized trial, a meta analysis, an observational study, or an animal model — the details that separate real evidence from evidence shaped noise. The one line positioning: Consensus is…