Q: How does arlen/bench measure freshness?

Planted sentinel pages with known publish timestamps are probed against each vendor every 6 hours. Freshness lag is the Kaplan-Meier median time from publication to first appearance in vendor results, right-censored at 30 days.

Q: Can an AI agent sign up for these APIs without a human?

3 of 6 web-search vendors are agent-ready: an autonomous agent obtained a working API key via otp-email or device-code auth in live trials. Claude Code completed onboarding to Tavily in a median of 2 minutes 58 seconds; vendors requiring human signup or a credit card failed all trials with auth_wall.

Question 1

What is the most accurate web search API for AI agents?

Accepted Answer

On snapshot web_search-2026-q3, Exa leads hit@5 at 87.6% across 250 verified queries; Tavily leads on fresh queries (<30 days) at 86.4% and has the fastest time-to-retrievability at a 7.8-hour median. Serper has the lowest cost per verified-correct answer at $0.0041.

Question 2

How does arlen/bench measure freshness?

Accepted Answer

Planted sentinel pages with known publish timestamps are probed against each vendor every 6 hours. Freshness lag is the Kaplan-Meier median time from publication to first appearance in vendor results, right-censored at 30 days.

Question 3

Can an AI agent sign up for these APIs without a human?

Accepted Answer

3 of 6 web-search vendors are agent-ready: an autonomous agent obtained a working API key via otp-email or device-code auth in live trials. Claude Code completed onboarding to Tavily in a median of 2 minutes 58 seconds; vendors requiring human signup or a credit card failed all trials with auth_wall.

Registry	coverage %	refresh	last delta UTC	status
SEC EDGAR	31.0	daily	06-10 06:00	streaming
State SoS filings	60.0	weekly	06-08 04:00	streaming
Companies House	25.0	daily	06-10 05:30	streaming

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