Right Click, Wrong Box: Grading GUI Grounding by What a Click Does

Abstract

Leading GUI grounders score 93 to 96% on ScreenSpot-v2, and reported gaps between new and prior models are about a point. At this level the useful question is what the remaining errors are. Benchmarks count a click as correct only inside one annotated box, but interfaces often expose one action through several elements: a duplicated link, the label of a checkbox, the title next to a logo. The box is not wrong. The rule is incomplete. We call a click correct when executing it produces the same outcome as clicking the annotated target. A probe that executes and fingerprints about a thousand clicks per page turns this definition into outcome maps and an execution judge for live web applications, with no new annotation. We execute the predictions of three strong 7--8B grounders on a code forge and an online shop. About one in five and one in three of the clicks that box scoring rejects reach the intended outcome, and the shares remain one in seven and one in three when the instructions are rewritten as natural tasks. A blind audit of 11 models on ScreenSpot-v2 (three 7--8B grounders and eight 3B variants) finds the same effect on web screenshots, with two independent reviewers on a 60-unit subset. The share is highest for the strongest grounders. Training seeds and test-set sampling add noise that more runs and paired intervals control. Box scoring instead under-counts correct clicks, which repetition does not remove, and the audit-based correction of 0.2 to 1.8 points on ScreenSpot-v2 is as large as the gaps the field reports. The correction is needed in evaluation. In our 3B GRPO study, crediting equivalent clicks in the reward gives no stable gain over box rewards across three seeds and four test sets. We release the probe, the outcome maps, the audit and every prediction.