The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledge

Alexander Gill; Md Farhan Ishmam; Xuyen Nguyen; Neha Bhat; Parker Henry DeYoung; Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori; Nathan Stringham; Kenneth Marino; Ana Marasović

arXiv · 2609.30604

The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledge

Alexander Gill·Md Farhan Ishmam·Xuyen Nguyen·Neha Bhat·Parker Henry DeYoung·Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori·Nathan Stringham·Kenneth Marino·Ana Marasović

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Abstract

Existing computer-use agent benchmarks do not fully evaluate agents acting as assistants. A useful assistant retrieves information across complex, multi-step workflows, synthesizes it into artifacts (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), and navigates program interfaces to produce a coherent final product. Such workflows demand reasoning and synthesis, decomposition of complex tasks, as well as visual and spatial understanding. To study agents on workflows like these, we introduce KNOWS, a benchmark of open-ended, complex, browser-based tasks that jointly evaluate these capabilities, with each task culminating in a produced artifact. To write tasks, we develop a task design rubric and a protocol for ensuring that tasks meet the requirements. Each task is paired with an evaluator, a program that combines deterministic checks with LLM judgments to balance the richness, reliability, and automation tradeoff inherent to agent evaluation. We evaluate and analyze frontier computer-use agents and browser-based harnesses. They achieve moderate scores on partial-success metrics, but the best performer fully succeeds in fewer than 3% of our complex, long-horizon tasks. Failures on visual steps render the resulting artifacts unusable, even when agents complete more than 50% of other evaluation steps. Our results expose limitations of current agents acting as end-to-end assistants, and call for progress on tool use, visual understanding, and long-horizon reasoning.

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BibTeX RIS

Alexander Gill, Md Farhan Ishmam, Xuyen Nguyen, Neha Bhat, Parker Henry DeYoung, Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Nathan Stringham, Kenneth Marino, Ana Marasović. 2026-09-24. The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30604

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