Benchmark Almanac

AI Consumer Index

Not in model cards

Models with web search handle everyday consumer requests in shopping, food, gaming and DIY. Prompt-specific rubrics with hurdle and grounding criteria grade each answer.

400 hidden test cases and an 80-case open dev set. First leaderboard had 10 models.

In the authors’ words

We introduce the first version of the AI Consumer Index (ACE), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier AI models can perform everyday consumer tasks. ACE contains a hidden heldout set of 400 test cases, split across four consumer activities: shopping, food, gaming, and DIY. We are also open sourcing 80 cases as a devset with a CC-BY license. For the ACE leaderboard we evaluated 10 frontier models (with websearch turned on) using a novel grading methodology that dynamically checks whether relevant parts of the response are grounded in the retrieved web sources. GPT 5 (Thinking = High) is the top-performing model, scoring 56.1%, followed by o3 Pro (Thinking = On) at 55.2% and GPT 5.1 (Thinking = High) at 55.1%. Model scores differ across domains, and in Shopping the top model scores under 50%. We find that models are prone to hallucinating key information, such as prices. ACE shows a substantial gap between the performance of even the best models and consumers' AI needs.

Abstract of The AI Consumer Index (ACE) (arXiv:2512.04921, CC0)
Made by Mercor Released Dec 2025 General assistants Public tasks plus a private test set
Level
Everyday Most adults, without training
Scored
Graded by a model A language model scores each response, usually against a rubric.
Answers
Open-ended Free-form text, documents, designs or media judged as a whole.

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See the live leaderboard on mercor.com

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We read the headline results of 479 launch posts from 51 labs, and none of them list this benchmark.

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