Semantic Scholar records 8,198,672 monthly visits with +5.8% month-over-month growth and Free pricing. Side Reader records 355 monthly visits with -36.5% growth and Freemium pricing.
A free, AI-powered academic search engine for 240M+ papers across every scientific field
Read and chat with PDFs right beside ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek.
| Dimension / Metric | | |
|---|---|---|
| Official Domain | semanticscholar.org | side-reader.com |
| Pricing Model | Free | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 8.2M (8,198,672) | 355 (355) |
| MoM Traffic Delta |
| +450.65K (+5.8%) |
| -204 (-36.5%) |
| Primary Market & Share | 🇺🇸 United States (22.9%) | 🇻🇳 Vietnam (100%) |
|---|
| Direct Visits / mo | 1.88M | 149 |
|---|
| User Rating | 4.8 | 2.4 |
|---|
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |
|---|
A free, AI-powered academic search engine for 240M+ papers across every scientific field
Search 241 million-plus publications from every scientific field using natural-language queries that match meaning rather than exact keywords.
Each indexed paper gets a one-sentence machine-generated TLDR so you can triage results before committing to reading the full text.
An augmented PDF reader that highlights citations, definitions, equations and figures inline, and shows which later papers cited the passage you are reading.
See how a paper was cited, whether citations were influential, and which references shaped the work — useful for literature reviews and citation chasing.
Read and chat with PDFs right beside ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek.
PDFs render directly in the sidebar next to the chat, so your document and the AI conversation are visible at the same time.
Summarize a whole document, translate it, or have passages explained in simpler terms using the AI you are already signed into.
Built-in buttons cover the common actions, and you can edit their prompts to make the AI respond in the format and tone you need.
Ask about charts, scans or regions that cannot be selected by taking a screenshot question instead.
SpecialistBroader real-time web search capabilities with academic filters, but less specialized for deep bibliographic citation analysis than Semantic Scholar.
Synthesizes direct evidence-based answers from scientific papers, but has a less comprehensive raw database than Semantic Scholar.
#2
AI research platform for reading, understanding and writing scientific papers
#3A free, AI-powered PDF editor for every device
AI sidebar and browser agent for reading, writing and research
Bilingual AI translation for websites, documents, video and images
Excels at automated systematic review data extraction and evidence synthesis, but indexes a narrower slice of literature.
Free AI-powered PDF editor, converter and reader for every device
One AI assistant that plugs ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini into every tab
Cross-platform PDF editing with GPT-powered AI for reading, translating, and signing documents
Chat with any PDF, video, or website and get cited answers in seconds
SpecialistProvides advanced Smart Citations showing how papers support or dispute each other, but has a smaller overall index.
SpecialistBroader real-time web search capabilities with academic filters, but less specialized for deep bibliographic citation analysis than Semantic Scholar.
Synthesizes direct evidence-based answers from scientific papers, but has a less comprehensive raw database than Semantic Scholar.
AI research platform for reading, understanding and writing scientific papers
AI sidebar and browser agent for reading, writing and research
Bilingual AI translation for websites, documents, video and images
Excels at automated systematic review data extraction and evidence synthesis, but indexes a narrower slice of literature.
Free AI-powered PDF editor, converter and reader for every device
One AI assistant that plugs ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini into every tab
SpecialistProvides advanced Smart Citations showing how papers support or dispute each other, but has a smaller overall index.
