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.

Future-Proofing & Change Management

Do You Know Where to Use Al for the Biggest Business Impact?

Chris Mann, Product Lead, Enterprise AI Products

October 13, 2025

Guides

AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

You.com's Deep Research Agent 'ARI' Named on TIME's List of The Best Inventions of 2025

You.com Team, AI Experts

October 9, 2025

News & Press

API Management & Evolution

How to Integrate a Real-Time Web Search API Into Your GenAI Apps

You.com Team, AI Experts

October 7, 2025

Blog

API Management & Evolution

Build Production-Ready AI Solutions with You.com's Express API and Custom Agents

You.com Team, AI Experts

October 6, 2025

Blog

Measuring & Demonstrating ROI

An Enterprise Guide to AI ROI Measurement

You.com Team, AI Experts

September 30, 2025

Blog

API Management & Evolution

Paying 10x More After Google’s num=100 Change? Migrate to You.com in Under 10 Minutes

You.com Team, AI Experts

September 18, 2025

Blog

API Management & Evolution

September 2025 API Roundup: Introducing Express & Contents APIs

You.com Team, AI Experts

September 16, 2025

Blog

Comparisons, Evals & Alternatives

You.com vs. Microsoft Copilot: How They Compare for Enterprise Teams

You.com Team, AI Experts

September 10, 2025

Blog