No single winner: Perplexity medium leads on answer quality, Brave Search on speed
Asked:
“which is web search better for agents?”
Two independent benchmarks, as of 17 October 2026: the Artificial Analysis Search Index covers 24 provider/mode configurations (Search Index 0–100 plus end-to-end task time and benchmark cost), and AIMultiple's agentic-search benchmark covers 8 providers (agent score plus raw API latency). Each complete leaderboard is single-sourced from its publisher's one canonical page; the two use different datasets and metrics and are never combined here.
Quality-firstPerplexity Search (medium) — Search Index 80, the top score of 24 configurations, at 28.2s per benchmark task.
Speed-firstBrave Search — best agent score (14.89) and lowest API latency (669 ms) of AIMultiple's 8 providers.
Before you commitThe two benchmarks disagree on Perplexity and Brave. Run both finalists on your own query set.
Quality against speed, 24 configurations
Artificial Analysis Search Index (higher is better) vs end-to-end benchmark task time — the full agent task, not raw API latency. Bubble size: benchmark cost per task where a single dollar figure is given. Hover any point for details.
A different harness, a different winner
AIMultiple agentic-search benchmark: agent score (bars, higher is better) with raw API latency printed at right. 8 providers.
Perplexity takes the top two Artificial Analysis slots — medium at 80 and high at 79 — but at 28–36s per task its modes sit on the slow side of the field. artificialanalysis.ai
Brave Search's LLM-context mode scores 75 at 23.6s — faster than Parallel advanced's identical 75 at 35.9s — while plain Brave scores 65. artificialanalysis.ai
In AIMultiple's benchmark Brave wins on both axes (14.89 score, 669 ms), with Firecrawl (14.58, 1,335 ms) and Exa (14.39, 1,200 ms) close behind — and Perplexity drops to 12.96 at 11,000 ms. aimultiple.com
Tavily basic trails the Artificial Analysis field at 66 while posting its highest benchmark cost, $126 per task; TinyFish is listed at $0 but takes 59.4s. artificialanalysis.ai
Full leaderboards
Provider / mode
Benchmark
Score
Speed
Benchmark cost
Source
Method: 24 Artificial Analysis Search Index configurations (Search Index 0–100; speed is end-to-end benchmark task time; cost is the benchmark harness's total per task, not an API list price) and 8 AIMultiple agentic-search providers (agent score; latency is mean raw API latency in ms), both as published on 17 October 2026. The two benchmarks use different datasets, harnesses, metrics and latency definitions, so scores are shown side by side and never combined. Quality-index values from Artificial Analysis were cut from the table for space; they track Search Index exactly (score minus 33).