December 18, 2025

How to Evaluate AI Search for the Agentic Era

Zairah Mustahsan

Staff Data Scientist

The Core Challenge:
What Makes Search Evaluation Hard?

Al search and retrieval is now foundational to enterprise workflows. Yet, most teams don't have a clear evaluation framework, leading to hallucinations and poor performance. This technical guide allows your team to build more reliable Al Agents.

Key topics you’ll discover in this whitepaper:

  • How to build and use your "golden sets" for evaluating AI search: Learn to curate a definitive collection of queries to anchor your organization's consensus on quality.
  • How to deploy LLMs as impartial judges in evaluations: Learn how to score answer quality using LLMs, including sample prompts and code.
  • How to approach evals with statistical rigor: Leverage confidence intervals and variance decomposition to distinguish genuine performance improvements.

Whether you’re comparing search providers, optimizing a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, or building agentic systems, this whitepaper is your essential resource for running meaningful AI search evals and driving robust, reproducible evaluations.

Featured resources.

All resources.

Browse our complete collection of tools, guides, and expert insights — helping your team turn AI into ROI.

Two men speaking onstage in separate panels, each gesturing during a presentation, framed by geometric shapes and gradient color blocks.
Company

AI in 2026: Inside the Future-Shaping Predictions from You.com Co-Founders

You.com Team, AI Experts

January 27, 2026

Blog

Black you.com cover reading “What Is AI Grounding and How Does It Work?” above a blue geometric pattern on a gradient purple background.
AI 101

What Is AI Grounding and How Does it Work?

Brooke Grief, Head of Content

January 26, 2026

Guides

Book cover titled “AI Predictions for 2026” with gradient background, text blocks showing names, and two men pictured speaking onstage in small photo panels.
Company

2026 AI Predictions: Insights from You.com Co-Founders

Richard Socher, You.com Co-Founder & CEO

January 23, 2026

Guides

Light blue graphic with the text ‘What Is MCP?’ on the left and simple outlined geometric shapes, including nested diamonds and a partial circle, on the right.
API Management & Evolution

What Is Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Edward Irby, Senior Software Engineer

January 22, 2026

Blog

Graphic with the text ‘What are Vertical Indexes?’ beside simple burgundy line art showing stacked diamond shapes and geometric elements on a light background.
AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

What the Heck Are Vertical Search Indexes?

Oleg Trygub, Senior AI Engineer

January 20, 2026

Blog

A flowchart showing a looped process: Goal → Context → Plan, curving into Action → Evaluate, with arrows indicating continuous iteration.
AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

The Agent Loop: How AI Agents Actually Work (and How to Build One)

Mariane Bekker, Senior Developer Relations

January 16, 2026

Blog

A speaker with light hair and glasses gestures while talking on a panel at the World Economic Forum, with the you.com logo shown in the corner of the image.
AI 101

Before Superintelligent AI Can Solve Major Challenges, We Need to Define What 'Solved' Means

Richard Socher, You.com Co-Founder & CEO

January 14, 2026

News & Press

Stacked white cubes on gradient background with tiny squares.
AI Search Infrastructure

AI Search Infrastructure: The Foundation for Tomorrow’s Intelligent Applications

Brooke Grief, Head of Content

January 9, 2026

Blog