AI tools for research

Best for: All-round drafting, brainstorming, rewriting and quick analysis

OpenAI's general-purpose assistant for writing, Q&A, file analysis, image generation and more.

Best for: Long-form writing, editing long documents and careful reasoning

Anthropic's AI assistant, strong at long documents, nuanced writing and coding help.

Best for: Everyday help if you live in Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive)

Google's AI assistant with deep research and integration into Google apps.

Best for: Web research answers with cited sources

AI answer engine that searches the web and cites its sources.

Best for: Studying and querying your own documents; audio overviews

Google's research notebook that answers from your uploaded sources and makes audio overviews.

Best for: Literature reviews and extracting data from papers

AI research assistant for finding, summarising and extracting from academic papers.

Best for: Evidence-based answers from scientific research

AI search engine that answers questions from peer-reviewed research.

Best for: Checking how papers are cited (supporting vs contrasting)

Shows citation context — whether research supports or disputes a claim.

Best for: General-purpose autonomous agent for multi-step tasks

Autonomous AI agent that plans and executes multi-step tasks like research and building.