December 18, 2025

How to Evaluate AI Search for the Agentic Era

Zairah Mustahsan

Staff Data Scientist

Share
  1. LI Test

  2. LI Test

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.

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

Cover of the You.com whitepaper titled "How We Evaluate AI Search for the Agentic Era," with the text "Exclusive Ungated Sneak Peek" on a blue background.
Comparisons, Evals & Alternatives

How to Evaluate AI Search in the Agentic Era: A Sneak Peek 

Zairah Mustahsan

Staff Data Scientist

January 8, 2026

Blog

API Management & Evolution

You.com Hackathon Track

Mariane Bekker

Head of Developer Relations

January 5, 2026

Guides

Chart showing variance components and ICC convergence for GPT-5 on FRAMES benchmarks, analyzing trials per question and number of questions for reliability.
Comparisons, Evals & Alternatives

Randomness in AI Benchmarks: What Makes an Eval Trustworthy?

Zairah Mustahsan

Staff Data Scientist

December 19, 2025

Blog

Screenshot of the You.com API Playground interface showing a "Search" query input field, code examples, response area, and sidebar navigation on a gradient background.
Product Updates

December 2025 API Roundup: Evals, Vertical Index, New Developer Tooling and More

Chak Pothina

Product Marketing Manager, APIs

December 16, 2025

Blog

A person holding a stack of books, reaching for another, against a futuristic blue geometric background.
AI Agents & Custom Indexes

Introduction to AI Research Agents

You.com Team

December 12, 2025

Blog

Illustration of justice scales on a blue background, overlaid with circuitry patterns, symbolizing the intersection of law and technology.
AI Agents & Custom Indexes

What Are Legal AI Agents?

You.com Team

December 9, 2025

Blog