Citation Verifier for AI Research

LLMs often generate citations that look correct but are fake, retracted, or irrelevant. A tool that automatically verifies citations, checks if papers exist, confirms they haven't been retracted, and validates relevance to search queries. Perfect for researchers, students, and professionals who use AI for fact-finding.

Hallucination in LLM outputs has become a documented, widely-reported problem in academic and professional settings, and the specific failure mode of fake citations is now well-known enough that universities are issuing formal warnings about it — the timing is real. No clear incumbent owns this space, though tools like Semantic Scholar and Retraction Watch provide adjacent functionality that a scrappy verification layer could tie together. The $2k–10k/mo revenue band is plausible if priced as a B2B API or institutional add-on, but consumer-facing freemium would likely stall there permanently rather than break through it. The biggest risk is that the major AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) build citation verification directly into their products, which they're already beginning to do with grounding and source-linking features, making a standalone tool redundant before it reaches meaningful scale.