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arXiv · 2601.17617

Agentic Search in the Wild: Intents and Trajectory Dynamics from 14M+ Real Search Requests

Jingjie Ning·João Coelho·Yibo Kong·Yunfan Long·Bruno Martins·João Magalhães·Jamie Callan·Chenyan Xiong
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Abstract

LLM-powered search agents are increasingly being used for multi-step information seeking tasks, yet the IR community lacks empirical understanding of how agentic search sessions unfold and how retrieved evidence is reflected in later queries. This paper presents a large-scale log analysis of agentic search based on 14.44M search requests (3.97M sessions) collected from DeepResearchGym, i.e., an open-source search API accessed by external agentic clients. We sessionize the logs, assign session-level intents and step-wise query-reformulation labels using LLM-based annotation, and propose Context-driven Term Adoption Rate (CTAR) to quantify whether newly introduced query terms are lexically traceable to previously retrieved evidence. Our analyses reveal distinctive behavioral patterns. First, over 90\% of multi-turn sessions contain at most ten steps, and 89\% of inter-step intervals fall under one minute. Second, behavior varies by intent. Fact-seeking sessions exhibit high repetition that increases over time, while sessions requiring reasoning sustain broader exploration. Third, query reformulations are often traceable to retrieved evidence across steps. On average, 54\% of newly introduced query terms appear in the accumulated evidence context, with additional traceability to earlier steps beyond the most recent retrieval. These findings provide candidate signals for repetition-aware stopping, intent-adaptive retrieval budgeting, and explicit cross-step context tracking. We released the anonymized logs, making them available at a public HuggingFace~\chref{https://huggingface.co/datasets/cx-cmu/deepresearchgym-agentic-search-logs}{repository}.

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Jingjie Ning, João Coelho, Yibo Kong, Yunfan Long, Bruno Martins, João Magalhães, Jamie Callan, Chenyan Xiong. 2026-01-24. Agentic Search in the Wild: Intents and Trajectory Dynamics from 14M+ Real Search Requests. https://doi.org/10.1145/3805712.3809627

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