December 18, 2025

[DOWNLOAD] How We Evaluate AI Search for the Agentic Era

Zairah Mustahsan

Staff Data Scientist

Blue book cover titled "How We Evaluate AI Search for the Agentic Era" by You.com, featuring abstract geometric shapes and a gradient blue background.

Download the full whitepaper to elevate your approach to AI search evaluations.

This guide details why most ad hoc approaches to evaluations fail and lays out a four-phase methodology—problem definition, data collection, query execution, and robust statistical analysis—to ensure your AI search solution is truly optimized for your intended use case.

Evaluating AI search has become a critical challenge in the age of LLM-powered, agentic systems. Our latest whitepaper, “How We Evaluate aI Search for the Agentic Era,” provides a deep dive into the rigorous process of AI search evaluations (“evals”), going far beyond simple query testing.

Key topics you’ll discover in this whitepaper:

  • How to build and use golden sets for evaluating AI search, and why custom and benchmark datasets both matter for comprehensive evals.
  • The use of LLMs as impartial judges in evaluations—validated against human graders—to score search result relevance and answer quality.
  • Why statistical rigor, including confidence intervals and variance decomposition, is essential for trustworthy AI search evaluations.

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.

Company

You.com wants to be your AI search engine for complex work queries

You.com Team, AI Experts

August 22, 2024

News & Press

Future-Proofing & Change Management

Access the most powerful AI models in one place on you.com

You.com Team, AI Experts

July 29, 2024

Blog

Comparisons, Evals & Alternatives

Inside you.com: Benchmarking the Leading AI Chat Experience

You.com Team, AI Experts

June 28, 2024

Blog

Comparisons, Evals & Alternatives

Introducing the YOU API: Web-scale search for LLMS

You.com Team, AI Experts

June 27, 2024

Blog

AI Search Infrastructure

GenAI for Media

You.com Team, AI Experts

Guides

AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

Increase Your Productivity with Custom Agents

You.com Team, AI Experts

Guides

AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

Trusted Deep Research GenAI for Financial Services

You.com Team, AI Experts

Guides

AI Search Infrastructure

Enterprise One-Pager

You.com Team, AI Experts

Guides