Similar Accuracy, Unequal Evidence: Search APIs as Decision Surfaces for Tool-Using Agents
Search APIs expose ranked snippets, URLs, and metadata on which agents decide whether to answer, search again, or fetch pages. We evaluate these interfaces as decision surfaces on a fixed sample of 100 questions from the 254-question SealQA-Hard subset, using one frozen GPT-5.4 agent, a fixed orchestration harness, and a shared page-fetch backend across Brave, Tavily, and Firecrawl. A Kimi-K2.6 oracle labels visible URL-level evidence; a separate answer audit yields 25, 25, and 26 correct answers out of 100. These counts indicate similar observed accuracy but do not establish equivalence. Under the tested configurations, Brave exposes more pre-fetch support alongside a larger snippet surf...
| Authors | Sriram Selvam, Anneswa Ghosh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 September 2026 |
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