The strength of search agents has been largely determined by BrowseComp over the past year. However, this benchmark is losing its effectiveness — it pushed model performance from 30% to 90% in just 10 months, and the significance of the benchmark itself is rapidly being surpassed. On July 17, Meituan's LongCat introduced a tougher test called LoHoSearch, aiming to push search agents back into a phase of improvement.

LoHoSearch's challenges are not created by humans but are instead automatically generated from a knowledge graph of 7.62 million entities on Wikipedia. Due to their machine-generated origin, they reach difficulty levels that human annotators could never consistently design in terms of search space and structural complexity. In other words, previous benchmarks were designed by human brains, and even the hardest questions had a ceiling; LoHoSearch hands over the question-creation authority to the knowledge graph, completely removing the difficulty ceiling.

The results are striking. In tests with 11 cutting-edge models, the best score was only 34.74%, while the next three models scored around 15% to 16%. Meanwhile, the same top models currently achieve about 90% on BrowseComp. The gap clearly shows that LoHoSearch has exposed the true weaknesses of search agents. Even more interestingly, the marginal utility of context strategies: the best context strategy on LoHoSearch only brought a 6.8 percentage point improvement, while the same operation achieved 14 percentage points on BrowseComp — meaning that the old approach of compensating for ability gaps through prompts and context engineering is almost ineffective in this new benchmark.
This benchmark itself contains 544 questions covering 11 fields, organized in tree-like and graph structures, and has already been open-sourced. When the old benchmark reaches its peak, the real challenges for search agents have just begun, and LoHoSearch may become an unavoidable test item next.
