Equal Accuracy, Unequal Evidence: Search APIs as Decision Surfaces for Tool-Using Agents

arXiv:2607.10198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search APIs are the fundamental retrieval layer for many agents and are often their most frequently used tool. Traditional search APIs provide URLs, titles, and snippets that preview website contents. Because full-page retrieval is token-intensive, agent retrieval architectures increasingly use progressive disclosure: the agent first sees snippets and then chooses whether to fetch full pages. In such systems, search API performance is often evaluat...