Cito
Hybrid academic search over 236M papers, built for agents
What this is
A free academic-paper search API over 236M papers with an MCP endpoint, built so AI agents like Claude Code can do literature research without hitting rate limits.
Our one-line summary — not the founder’s tagline.
- How it works
- A hybrid search engine over the Semantic Scholar corpus — 236M papers in the keyword index, 146M with dense vectors — fused with RRF and reranked by a cross-encoder, with a plain JSON API and a native MCP endpoint.
- What's different
- Built specifically so AI agents like Claude Code can run literature research without hitting the rate limits that other academic APIs impose.
- Pricing
- Free web search with no signup.
- Best for
- AI agents and developers doing deep academic literature research.
What we measured
Nobody else publishes this — it comes from knocking on the door every day.
- Watched by us
- 11 days
- Last checked
- 5d ago
Where it shows up
Every group here is a page of its own — each one checked daily.
The numbersIs it still shipping, is it overpriced, where did it land — and what the price is built from.
League price & chart
No money. No seat. It goes on your record — and in 28 days reality settles it.
Calls are closed while we rebuild accounts. You can still read every one of them.
AI. Launched 11d ago on Product Hunt, picking up 116 votes. Today, it's been quiet for 7 days and the price has started to bleed.
Already bleeding a little every day, and it accelerates the longer it stays quiet.
We check this site every day, ourselves. A founder can post “still working on it” — a claim like that doesn't price. What we price is what we can verify from the outside: evidence, not announcements. The real question isn't “will this be huge?” — it's “will they still be moving in four weeks?”
The market viewHow this launch is priced and ranked in our league — the investor side of the page.
ranked by the reality anchor, not the market price
It launched on Product Hunt with 116 votes.
No matter how much money goes in. There is no pump here — you can't make yourself right by buying more. The line only moves on things that actually happened: an award, revenue that grew, a new platform, code that shipped — or silence.
1 quiet day in between are left out — nothing happened on them. A launch that goes quiet eases down a little at a time — never a cliff you could have run from the night before.
Daily tracking just started for this launch — the first point is on the board. A second reading lands with tomorrow's run, and the curve builds from there.
How the launch is moving on its own board, day by day — the crowd's attention.
A flat line is normal: votes stop within a day or two of launch, on every board. What's unusual — and what actually counts — is a launch that keeps pulling votes long after its day is over.
About
Cito is a hybrid search engine over the Semantic Scholar corpus: 236M papers in the keyword index, 146M with SPECTER2 dense vectors, fused with RRF and reranked by a cross-encoder. Free web search with no signup, a plain JSON API, and a native MCP endpoint so agents like Claude Code can run deep literature research without upstream rate limits. Built because every academic API throttled my agents to death.
Where it launched
1 platform| Platform | Votes | Counts toward price | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product Hunt | 116 | sets the price | ↗ |
The board it did best on sets the price. Every other board only adds to it if the launch also placed high on that board too — because just showing up somewhere isn't an achievement. Listing on twelve directories is free; placing well on them isn't.
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