Benchmark Almanac

BrowseComp-Plus

Claude Opus 4.5 67.6% leads since Nov 2025 In use

Deep research agents answer 830 BrowseComp questions by searching a fixed corpus of about 100,000 human-verified documents.

BrowseComp-Plus is a different evaluation from BrowseComp. Labs use different retrievers and graders, so scores vary by setup.

In the authors’ words

Deep-Research agents, which integrate large language models (LLMs) with search tools, have shown success in improving the effectiveness of handling complex queries that require iterative search planning and reasoning over search results. Evaluations on current benchmarks like BrowseComp relies on black-box live web search APIs, have notable limitations in (1) fairness: dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder fair comparisons and reproducibility of deep research methods; (2) transparency: lack of control over the document corpus makes it difficult to isolate retriever contributions. In other words, the current evaluations may compare a complete deep research system at a given time, but they do not foster well-controlled experiments to provide insights into the capability of underlying deep research LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp, employing a fixed, carefully curated corpus. Each query in BrowseComp-Plus includes human-verified supporting documents and mined challenging negatives, enabling controlled experimentation. The benchmark is shown to be effective in distinguishing the performance of deep research systems. For instance, the open-source model Search-R1, when paired with the BM25 retriever, achieves 3.86% accuracy, whereas the GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Integrating the GPT-5 with the Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further enhances its accuracy to 70.1% with fewer search calls. This benchmark allows comprehensive evaluation and disentangled analysis of deep research agents and retrieval methods, fostering insights into retrieval effectiveness, citation accuracy, and context engineering in Deep-Research system.

Abstract of BrowseComp-Plus: A More Fair and Transparent Evaluation Benchmark of Deep-Research Agent (arXiv:2508.06600, CC0)
Made by University of Waterloo and collaborators Released Aug 2025 Deep research All tasks public Last in a launch post Oct 2026 Last model added Oct 2026
Level
Expert Specialists with years of training, often over hours of work
Scored
Graded by a model A language model scores each response, usually against a rubric.
Answers
Short answer A number, word or short string matched to a key.
4
Models scored in lab cards
3
Launch posts list it, from 2 labs
1
System card reports it, from 1 lab

Claude Opus 4.5 leads with 67.6%

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

  1. 1 Claude Opus 4.5 67.6%
  2. 2 Mercury 3 55.2%
  3. 3 LFM3-1.7B 37%
  4. 4 LFM2.5-2.6B 26.9%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Claude Opus 4.5 67.6% Nov 2025 Model card
2 Mercury 3 55.2% Oct 2026 Model card
3 LFM3-1.7B 37% Oct 2026 Model card
4 LFM2.5-2.6B 26.9% Aug 2026 Model card

Number one over time

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

Anthropic
Lab claims 1 leader

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2026 2027 Near the ceiling (85%) Claude Opus 4.5 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2026 2027 Near the ceiling (85%) Claude Opus 4.5

2 labs put it in a launch post in the last six months

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

Liquid AI
Inception Labs
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
27 Oct 2026 LFM3-1.7B 37 BrowseComp-Plus (OpenClaw subset)
19 Oct 2026 Mercury 3 55.2 BrowseComp+
4 Aug 2026 LFM2.5-2.6B 26.9 BrowseComp+ (OpenClaw)

One system card reports it

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
24 Nov 2025 Claude Opus 4.5 system card 67.6 BrowseComp-Plus agentic search, with tool result clearing, Qwen3-Embedding-8B search, no fetch tool, single run (Table 2.6.A; 72.89% with tool result clearing + memory; Figure 2.6.2.A with fetch tool 70.48% base to 85.30% with subagents) Capabilities

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