Score: 3

DeepWideSearch: Benchmarking Depth and Width in Agentic Information Seeking

Published: October 23, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.20168v1

By: Tian Lan , Bin Zhu , Qianghuai Jia and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers find and understand lots of information.

Business Areas:
Semantic Search Internet Services

Current search agents fundamentally lack the ability to simultaneously perform \textit{deep} reasoning over multi-hop retrieval and \textit{wide}-scale information collection-a critical deficiency for real-world applications like comprehensive market analysis and business development. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepWideSearch, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agents to integrate depth and width in information seeking. In DeepWideSearch, agents must process a large volume of data, each requiring deep reasoning over multi-hop retrieval paths. Specifically, we propose two methods to converse established datasets, resulting in a curated collection of 220 questions spanning 15 diverse domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art agents achieve only 2.39% average success rate on DeepWideSearch, highlighting the substantial challenge of integrating depth and width search in information-seeking tasks. Furthermore, our error analysis reveals four failure modes: lack of reflection, overreliance on internal knowledge, insufficient retrieval, and context overflow-exposing key limitations in current agent architectures. We publicly release DeepWideSearch to catalyze future research on more capable and robust information-seeking agents.


Page Count
25 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language