Characterizing Web Search by Conversational LLM Agents: From Search Decisions and Strategies to Results and Responses
arXiv:2609.19244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational LLM agents increasingly rely on Web search, yet the end-to-end lifecycle of agentic search remains poorly understood. We present the first study of Web search across four major conversational platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek), combining real-world user interactions (invivo) with controlled experiments using the same platform's models by their APIs (invitro). We investigate the quality of agentic dec…