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Main Authors: FutureSearch, :, Bosse, Nikos I., Evans, Jon, Gambee, Robert G., Hnyk, Daniel, Mühlbacher, Peter, Phillips, Lawrence, Schwarz, Dan, Wildman, Jack
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06287
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author FutureSearch
:
Bosse, Nikos I.
Evans, Jon
Gambee, Robert G.
Hnyk, Daniel
Mühlbacher, Peter
Phillips, Lawrence
Schwarz, Dan
Wildman, Jack
author_facet FutureSearch
:
Bosse, Nikos I.
Evans, Jon
Gambee, Robert G.
Hnyk, Daniel
Mühlbacher, Peter
Phillips, Lawrence
Schwarz, Dan
Wildman, Jack
contents Amongst the most common use cases of modern AI is LLM chat with web search enabled. However, no direct evaluations of the quality of web research agents exist that control for the continually-changing web. We introduce Deep Research Bench, consisting of 89 multi-step web research task instances of varying difficulty across 8 diverse task categories, with the answers carefully worked out by skilled humans. We provide a "RetroSearch" environment with a large frozen set of scraped web pages, and demonstrate that offline "RetroSearch" agents perform comparably to "live web" agents, enabling reliable evaluations of models over time. We provide robust agent tooling and scaffolding to benchmark major LLMs as they are released, including "thinking" models like o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. We include automated evaluations of the lengthy agent traces to report progress over time in hallucinations, tool use, and forgetting. Finally, we evaluate the major web research products branded as "Deep Research", "Deep Search", "Search", or "Research." Results are available on a public leaderboard at https://drb.futuresearch.ai/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06287
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Research Bench: Evaluating AI Web Research Agents
FutureSearch
:
Bosse, Nikos I.
Evans, Jon
Gambee, Robert G.
Hnyk, Daniel
Mühlbacher, Peter
Phillips, Lawrence
Schwarz, Dan
Wildman, Jack
Artificial Intelligence
Amongst the most common use cases of modern AI is LLM chat with web search enabled. However, no direct evaluations of the quality of web research agents exist that control for the continually-changing web. We introduce Deep Research Bench, consisting of 89 multi-step web research task instances of varying difficulty across 8 diverse task categories, with the answers carefully worked out by skilled humans. We provide a "RetroSearch" environment with a large frozen set of scraped web pages, and demonstrate that offline "RetroSearch" agents perform comparably to "live web" agents, enabling reliable evaluations of models over time. We provide robust agent tooling and scaffolding to benchmark major LLMs as they are released, including "thinking" models like o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. We include automated evaluations of the lengthy agent traces to report progress over time in hallucinations, tool use, and forgetting. Finally, we evaluate the major web research products branded as "Deep Research", "Deep Search", "Search", or "Research." Results are available on a public leaderboard at https://drb.futuresearch.ai/.
title Deep Research Bench: Evaluating AI Web Research Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06287