# AgentWebBench: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Coordination in Agentic Web

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10938/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 45 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- [Active Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06983/) (2023)
- [Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01560/) (2023)
- [WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21776/) (2025)
- [DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03160/) (2025)
- [Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02224/) (2023)
- [Promptagator: Few-shot Dense Retrieval From 8 Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11755/) (2022)
- [Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent For Data Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18679/) (2024)
- [AI Agents That Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01502/) (2024)
- [The Landscape of Emerging AI Agent Architectures for Reasoning, Planning, and Tool Calling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11584/) (2024)
- [ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06703/) (2024)
- [Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18096/) (2025)
- [DS-Agent: Automated Data Science by Empowering Large Language Models with Case-Based Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17453/) (2024)
- [Towards Scientific Intelligence: A Survey of LLM-based Scientific Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24047/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Retrieval Quality in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13781/) (2024)
- [AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00587/) (2025)
- [A Survey of AI Agent Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16736/) (2025)
- [A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05668/) (2025)
- [A Survey of LLM-Driven AI Agent Communication: Protocols, Security Risks, and Defense Countermeasures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19676/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Beyond Corrected Memory: Execution Consistency in Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08101/) (2026)
- [From Monoliths to Swarms: A Study of Attack Surface Evolution in the Transition to Multi-Agent Web Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00202/) (2026)
- [Zipbench: Low-Cost Framework for Compressing Comprehensive Benchmarks of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12475/) (2026)
- [Webhell: A Unified Interface for Agentic Web Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13416/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic Web is an emerging paradigm where autonomous agents help users use online information. As the paradigm develops, content providers are also deploying agents to manage their data and serve it through controlled interfaces. This shift moves information access from centralized retrieval to decentralized coordination. To study this setting, we introduce AgentWebBench, a benchmark that evaluates how well a user agent synthesizes answers by interacting with website-specific content agents. We evaluate four tasks that cover common web information needs, spanning ranked retrieval (web search, web recommendation) and open-ended synthesis (question answering, deep research). Across seven advanced LLMs and three coordination strategies, multi-agent coordination generally lags behind centralized retrieval as expected, because user agent cannot directly access the corpus, but the gap shrinks with model scale and can even outperform centralized retrieval on question answering. This benchmark also enables us to study properties of the emerging paradigm of the digital world. We find that decentralized access concentrates traffic toward a small set of websites, test time scaling improves both interaction reliability and task performance, and strong results require sufficient interactions guided by careful planning. Finally, our failure analysis suggests that user agents need better planning and answer synthesis, while content agents need more reliable retrieval and evidence quality. Code, data, and APIs are released on https://github.com/cxcscmu/AgentWebBench.