# Live Web Search Benchmarks: Pick the Right Engine, Depth, and Model for Your Agent

By Steven Van · 2026-08-12

We published live leaderboards grading web search configurations across four task suites.

OpenRouter has published live leaderboards that grade web search configurations across four task suites: BrowseComp, DeepSearchQA, WideSearch, and HLE. The [benchmarks](<https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/web-search-benchmark/>) compare search engines, search depth, and models by quality, cost, and speed, and update as new runs and models are added.

A few findings from the initial data:

- Search budget affects quality more than any other single factor. On BrowseComp, raising the turn budget from 1 to 25 roughly doubled scores across providers, for 2.5 to 7 times the cost per question.

- A high failure rate drives worst-case costs: models tend to keep searching up to their budget limit even when they end up wrong, so unlimited depth is costliest on hard workloads.

- Model choice matters more than engine choice. Holding the model constant, switching engine changed BrowseComp scores by about 10 points on average; switching between frontier and budget models changed scores by about 15 points.

The configurations are available today as request parameters on [OpenRouter](<https://creatorstoolbox.com/tools/openrouter>): the web plugin runs a single search before the model answers, while the server tool gives the model a search tool it can call repeatedly, up to a cap set by max\_tool\_calls. Engine can be set to exa, parallel, perplexity, native, or auto.

[![](<https://openrouter.ai/blog/images/web-search-benchmark.png>)](<https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/web-search-benchmark/>)

![OpenRouter](<https://openrouter.ai/favicon/glyph.png>)

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Sources

[Original source](<https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/web-search-benchmark/>)

[Read Live Web Search Benchmarks: Pick the Right Engine, Depth, and Model for Your Agent on Creators Toolbox](<https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/openrouter-live-web-search-benchmarks-pick-the-right-engine-depth-and-model-for->)

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Canonical source: https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/openrouter-live-web-search-benchmarks-pick-the-right-engine-depth-and-model-for-