The Challenge
Citations for an AI Assistant
A popular AI writing assistant wanted to differentiate in the crowded productivity market by solving research needs for students, professionals, and writers. They faced key obstacles:
Citation friction: Users abandoned writing flow to manually search for, verify, and format citations from academic sources, killing productivity.
Accuracy concerns: Without integrated verification, users couldn't ensure citations were from reputable, peer-reviewed sources.
Educational market barriers: Schools hesitated to adopt AI writing tools that couldn't reliably connect to verified academic research.
The Solution
Real-time citation engine
The platform built a real-time citation engine that seamlessly integrates academic research discovery and citation formatting into the writing workflow, powered by Exa's search endpoint with neural search.
Working with Exa's API, the writing assistant created:
Contextual Citation Suggestions: Semantic analysis of user text intelligently suggests relevant academic citations while writing, without requiring explicit searches.
Live Content Extraction: Real-time extraction of academic paper content to find the best quotes for users to directly cite in their writing.
What's under the hood?
Integrating Exa's search and snippets
The citation engine leverages Exa's Search endpoint to provide contextual academic research discovery. The system analyzes user writing in real-time and surfaces relevant academic sources without interrupting the creative flow.
Qualities:
- Neural search
- Keyword-based search
- Relevant results
Integrate Exa Search
Key benefits of using Exa's Search Endpoint include:
- Neural search for academic content: Semantic understanding finds research papers that match the meaning and context of user writing.
- Real-time content extraction: Pull key quotes directly from academic sources.
- Top sources coverage: Access to research papers, journals, and academic databases in real-time.
Business outcomes
Revenue growth to $6M ARR and 10% increase in free-to-paid user conversion
The writing assistant launched the citation feature and saw immediate results across key metrics.
Revenue growth: Annual recurring revenue jumped from under $1M to $6M ARR in one year after launching citations.
Conversion improvement: Free-to-paid user conversion increased by 10%, with citation features as the primary upgrade driver.
Market expansion: Gained adoption in 230+ educational institutions, opening a previously resistant market segment.