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.

Code snippet showing .mcp.json setup with API configuration.
Product Updates

November 2025 API Roundup: Introducing Deep Search and New Developer Tooling

Chak Pothina, Product Marketing Manager, APIs

November 20, 2025

Blog

Comparisons, Evals & Alternatives

2025 API Benchmark Report

Zairah Mustahsan, Staff Data Scientist

November 18, 2025

Guides

AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

Evolution of Agent Management

Chris Mann, Product Lead, Enterprise AI Products

November 18, 2025

Guides

A vibrant, stylized image of a person with binoculars, outlined in purple, against a dark circuit board background, blending technology and exploration.
AI 101

AI Search: How Do Modern Search Engines Work?

Brooke Grief, Head of Content

November 18, 2025

Blog

A red shopping basket filled with groceries, including bananas, pineapple, and juice, placed against a supermarket aisle with a tech-inspired digital overlay.
AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

How the You.com Search API Empowers Competitor Intelligence for Retailers

Chak Pothina, Product Marketing Manager, APIs

November 13, 2025

Blog

Three people smiling and holding sticky notes in a modern office setting, outlined in purple, with colorful notes hanging in the background.
Product Updates

Dynamic Orchestration: A New Era of Multi-Step AI Workflows

You.com Team, AI Experts

November 11, 2025

Blog

AI Research Agents & Custom Indexes

AI for Higher Education: Real-World Use Cases Shaping the Future of Universities

You.com Team, AI Experts

November 6, 2025

Case Studies

A silver trophy with intricate details is displayed on a black base inside a glass case. The background is blurred, showcasing office chairs and a modern workspace, tinted in shades of purple for a stylized effect.
Company

Announcing the Winners of the You.com Agentic Hackathon 2025!

Manish Tyagi, Community Growth and Programs Manager

November 4, 2025

Blog