Advanced jobs / Research-and-report agent
Research-and-report agent
Searches many sources, cross-checks them and writes a cited report you can actually rely on.
- Difficulty
- Hard (4/5)
- Human checkpoints
- 3 to plan for
- Matching bots
- 8 on BotPickr
The job
An agent that takes a question such as "how is the market for X changing?", plans searches, reads dozens of pages and papers, and returns a structured report with citations.
Why it is hard
- Search results are noisy and sometimes wrong, so the agent has to judge sources, not just collect them.
- Long tasks overflow the context window; the agent needs notes, summaries and a plan that survive many steps.
- Fabricated citations look convincing. Every claim has to be traceable to a real page.
- Costs climb quickly when several sub-agents each browse widely.
What a good setup needs
Tools
- A search or browse tool (Perplexity-style search, Firecrawl or a web-research agent)
- A planner that splits the question into sub-questions
- A notes store so findings are saved outside the model's context
- A writer step that must cite a saved source for each claim
Guardrails
- Require a source URL for every claim and reject claims without one
- Cap pages read and total spend per run
- Block low-trust domains and prefer primary sources
- Log every search and page fetched so you can audit the run
Human-in-the-loop points
- Approve the research plan before the agent spends money on a deep run
- A person spot-checks the cited sources before the report is shared
- A human decides which conclusions go into any decision or publication
How to start small
Start here: Start with one narrow question, a 10-source limit and a short report. Check every citation by hand for the first ten runs.
How to know it works: Share of claims whose citation really supports them (aim for close to 100% on spot checks).
Bots that fit this job
Pick from the listings below. Open one for setup steps; those marked Paid have plan prices as shown by the vendor.
GPT Researcher
Agent that plans questions, browses many sources and writes a cited research report.
DeerFlow
Long-horizon research-and-code agent harness from ByteDance with tools, sandboxes and sub-agents.
Perplexity
Answer engine that searches the web and cites its sources, with deeper research mode for reports.
Manus
General-purpose cloud agent that researches, builds slides and sites, and runs long tasks.
Genspark
All-in-one AI workspace with a super agent that builds slides, docs, sheets and research reports from a prompt.
Elicit
Finds and summarizes academic papers and extracts data into tables.
Firecrawl
Turns any website into clean markdown or structured data for agents, handy for building prospect lists.
LangGraph
Library for building stateful, controllable agents as graphs with memory and human checkpoints.
Deep dives for these bots
Official docs and guides
- Anthropic: how we built our multi-agent research system ↗
- GPT Researcher documentation ↗
- Firecrawl documentation ↗
- LangGraph overview ↗
Quick answers
Can an AI agent write a research report I can trust?
Only with checks. Make the agent save a source for each claim, cap how much it reads, and have a person spot-check the citations before you rely on the report.
Do I need a multi-agent setup for research?
Not to start. A single agent with search, a notes store and a citation rule is easier to debug. Add sub-agents only when one agent cannot cover the breadth.
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