Best AI models for research.

Research assistance starts with a question and evidence you can inspect. A model can help compare sources, identify gaps and explain a difficult argument. The shortlist emphasizes reasoning, language and instruction following; the research workflow still needs access to the right material.

The list weighs the published results that matter for research and keeps the models close enough to the best one for a balanced task. Price picks the provider after that; it never lifts a weaker model into the list. 382 available models were considered and 42 have comparable evidence.

Each price is the cheapest provider read in the last three days, per M tokens, blended 3 in : 1 out.

This score does not measure web-search quality, citation accuracy or whether an answer is factually correct. Model knowledge and access to current sources are separate concerns.

The ranking uses the same Balanced settings as the Ask page. The Capability methodology has the sources, the exact identity rules, the task weights and the difficulty ranges.