Cito

Category

Developer Tools

Launched

July 16, 2026

Founder

Tao An

Website

cito.fim.ai

Cito is a hybrid search engine built on top of the Semantic Scholar corpus. It indexes 236 million academic papers for keyword search and 146 million of those papers with SPECTER2 dense vectors for semantic search. When a query is issued, results from both keyword and semantic searches are combined using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and then re ranked by a cross encoder model to improve relevance. The service is accessible through a free web interface that requires no signup, but its primary value lies in its programmatic access: a plain JSON API and a native MCP (Model Context Protocol) endpoint. The MCP endpoint allows AI agents—such as Claude Code—to perform deep literature searches without hitting the rate limits that plague other academic APIs. The creator explicitly built Cito because "every academic API throttled my agents to death."