Characterizing Web Search by Conversational LLM Agents: From Search Decisions and Strategies to Results and Responses

arXiv cs.AISeptember 18, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2609.19244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational LLM agents increasingly rely on Web search, yet the end-to-end lifecycle of agentic search remains poorly understood. We present the first study of Web search across four major conversational platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek), combining real-world user interactions (invivo) with controlled experiments using the same platform's models by their APIs (invitro). We investigate the quality of agentic decisions to invoke Web search, their strategies to formulate queries, the potential domain preferences in the search results they receive, and the choices they make when transforming search results into grounded responses.

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