Executive Summary

Researchers, knowledge workers, and compliance teams increasingly struggle with unreliable or untraceable citations—exacerbated by LLM hallucinations—turning basic provenance checks into slow, manual, risk-prone work that can cause reputational and regulatory harm. This problem is acute across an estimated 1.2M research teams and in regulated industries where auditability is mandatory. You could build an automated citation verification and provenance layer that embeds into browsers, document editors, and research platforms to flag questionable citations, retrieve and snapshot original sources, and produce exportable, tamper-evident audit logs. Offer real-time checks, bulk auditing, an API and plugins, and package it for enterprise buyers (targeting a ~$4K ACV per team). The market is timely and sizable—TAM roughly $4.8B (1.2M teams × $4K ACV)—because LLM adoption raises hallucination risk while regulatory and compliance priorities increase willingness to pay; integration-first workflows also favor embedded verification over standalone tools. You can differentiate by delivering deep, editor-level integrations and high-fidelity provenance (source snapshots, timestamping, cryptographic signatures) plus enterprise-grade reporting rather than basic citation searches; competition is medium, so there’s room to lead on reliability and workflow fit. The main challenges are scaling reliable source-matching and driving behavior change in conservative institutions, but a market score of 88 and revenue potential of 82 indicate the idea is worth pursuing if you can solve the engineering and adoption hurdles.

Market Opportunity

Automated citation verification and provenance for research workflows targets a $4.8B = 1.2M research teams × $4K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% YoY (estimate) driven by enterprise AI adoption and demand for auditability in research workflows.

Key trends driving demand: LLM adoption — widespread use of large language models is increasing hallucinations and creating demand for provenance and verification tools.; Regulatory and compliance focus — organizations are investing in auditability and traceability, which raises willingness to pay for verified citations.; Integration-first workflows — tools that embed verification directly into browsers and document editors capture more usage than standalone apps.; Provenance-as-data — companies want machine-readable provenance and immutable snapshots to attach to claims for legal and audit defensibility..

Key competitors include Perplexity.ai, Scite.ai, Consensus, Elicit (by Ought).

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Automated citation verification and provenance for research workflows

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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