Research & Analysis Skills — Papers, Markets, Competitors, News (2026)

Research & Analysis Skills accept a research question and produce a sourced answer. Under the hood they orchestrate multi-round work: plan queries, execute against web sources or specific databases, cross-reference findings, and produce a structured brief with inline citations. The best of these Skills pair with a search MCP server (Perplexity, Brave, or Grok's DeepSearch) for the fetch phase and use the AI provider for the synthesis phase.

The value the Skill layer adds is citation discipline — every non-obvious claim in the output traces to a source URL. Skills refuse to invent citations, mark single-source claims as needing verification, and surface contradictions between sources rather than silently averaging them. For research that will be quoted, cited, or acted on, this discipline is the difference between AI drafts you can use and AI drafts that get you in trouble.

What lives here vs. elsewhere: if the output is a sourced research artifact (a brief, a summary, a memo), it belongs here. If it's a document with formatting that contains research (a formal report, a case-study PDF), see Document Creation. If it's downstream content built from research (a blog post, an article), see Content Creation. If it's business-domain research (sales prospecting, HR intel), see Business Operations.

• You have a research question that needs 5+ good sources to answer well, and you want the sources documented.
• You're prepping for a meeting or presentation and need a briefing on a topic.
• You're writing an article or report and need source material with citations you can verify.
• You're doing due diligence and need a paper trail of what was checked and what was found.
• You need to keep up with a specific field or beat — Skills can produce recurring digests that respect your source whitelist.