WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking
Authors: name: Ryan Wong; name: Jiawei Wang; name: Junjie Zhao; name: Li Chen; name: Yan Gao; name: Long Zhang; name: Xuan Zhou; name: Zuo Wang; name: Kai Xiang; name: Ge Zhang; name: Wenhao Huang; name: Yang Wang; name: Ke Wang
Published: 2025-08-11 14:03:09

Abstract: From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked
by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively
complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated
search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans
from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such
"wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated
due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce
WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these
large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated
questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains,
grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale
atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange
it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline
ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We
benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including
single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most
systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer
reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple
human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate
that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale
information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and
development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark
results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/