Definition
Plain language
A benchmark that tests whether an AI agent can answer real web research questions by browsing.
As stated in the literature
An evaluation suite measuring open-ended web-research task completion by browsing agents over real web content.
Also called: BrowseComp-ZH
Why it matters: It measures whether web-browsing agents can actually do useful research on the real internet, not just on curated snapshots.
For example, a BrowseComp task might ask 'what was the closing price of company X the day its CEO resigned?' and require the agent to actually find and read news on the live web.
Heard on the show
“Harness engineering: improve a terminal agent, and improve a web-search agent on a benchmark called BrowseComp.”Episode 131 — Why Autonomous Research Agents Forget Their Own Lessons, and Arbor's Fix