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.

    Share Article:

  1. LI Test

  2. LI Test

Related resources.

You.com vs Exa for AI Agents: What Each Search API Returns

You.com vs Exa for AI Agents: What Each Search API Returns

September 30, 2026

Blog

Exa vs Websets for Research: Raw Results or Built Lists?

Exa vs Websets for Research: Raw Results or Built Lists?

September 30, 2026

Blog

What Is the Best SerpApi Alternative? Per-Request Pricing, Parsed Results, and What to Test

SerpApi Alternative in 2026: When to Switch, What to Switch To, and What to Test

September 18, 2026

Blog

What Is the Gemini Web Search API? Grounding With Google Search, Explained

What Is the Gemini Web Search API? Grounding With Google Search, Explained

September 17, 2026

Blog

What Is the Claude Web Search API? A Practical Guide for Developers

What Is the Claude Web Search API? A Practical Guide for Developers

September 17, 2026

Blog