Quantifying the Accuracy and Cost Impact of Design Decisions in Budget-Constrained Agentic LLM Search

Researchers developed Budget-Constrained Agentic Search (BCAS) to evaluate how search depth, retrieval strategies, and token budgets affect accuracy and cost in AI search systems. The study found that hybrid retrieval methods with lightweight re-ranking produce the largest gains, with accuracy improving up to a small cap of additional searches.