arXiv:2608. 04565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking.
By Xuebin Li, Hanqing Zhao, Siyuan Liang, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Nenghai Yu
arXiv:2606. 13610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content.
By Minghao Luo, Liang Chen
arXiv:2606. 28356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) lets content owners rewrite web content to increase their visibility in generative systems.
By Qianfeng Wen, Yifan Simon Liu, Xin Liu, Difan Jiao, Blair Yang, Junda Wu, Zhenwei Tang
The paper introduces FORGE, a benchmark that rewrites real product pages into fake ones to test how often search‑augmented large language models (LLMs) recommend these polluted items. Across 12 commercial and open‑weight LLMs, a single polluted page can lead to up to 27% of recommendations being fake, rising to 73.8% when the top‑3 replacements are used. The study finds that reasoning does not help and existing defenses—skepticism prompts, consensus filters, and credibility re‑ranking—are largely ineffective.
By Minghao Luo, Liang Chen
arXiv:2607. 04718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents decompose open-ended queries into subtasks, retrieve web evidence over multiple rounds, and synthesize long-form reports.
By Yue Pan, Ziheng Zhang, Junxiang Lei, Changhao Jia, Qingyi Si, Hongcheng Guo
The paper introduces MIRAGE, a benchmark of 750 multi‑step decision tasks designed to test autonomous web agents’ investigative abilities across Wikipedia Forensics, Shopping Admin adjudication, and Reddit Moderation. Each task contains a misleading visible context and a hidden context that holds decisive evidence, allowing performance to be broken down into Investigation, Reasoning, and Decision Accuracy, with an added Investigative Hallucination Rate. Evaluation of eight LLM agents reveals three consistent patterns: agents often reach relevant pages but fail to extract decisive evidence, procedural hints improve investigation but not decision accuracy on Wikipedia tasks, and 12.6% of trajectories include fabricated facts.
By Syed Nazmus Sakib, Nafiul Haque, Tapodhir Karmakar Taton, Shahrear Bin Amin, Shifat E. Arman
arXiv:2605.29224v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: AI agents augment large language models with external tools such as web retrieval, enabling grounded and up-to-date responses. However, incor...
By Aditya Nawal, Manit Baser, Mohan Gurusamy
arXiv:2605. 12887v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web-enabled LLM agents are changing how online information influences search outcomes.
By Hengwei Ye, Jiasheng Mao, Zhenhan Guan, Zheng Tian
arXiv:2606. 05241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Public benchmarks enable fair and reproducible evaluation of LLM reasoning, but they become fragile for deep research agents that actively search the web during inference.
By Yongjie Wang, Xinyue Zhang, Kunhong Yao, Zhiwei Zeng, Kaisong Song, Jun Lin, Zhiqi Shen
arXiv:2607. 20730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly use search tools to retrieve up-to-date information, introducing a new attack surface in which retrieved documents can be manipulated.
By Zhaoqi Wang, Zijian Zhang, Xiaomei Yuan, Pengtao Kou, Jiamou Liu, Zhen Li, Liehuang Zhu
arXiv:2512. 23128v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web-based agents powered by large language models are increasingly used for tasks such as email management or professional networking.
By Karolina Korgul, Yushi Yang, Arkadiusz Drohomirecki, Piotr B{\l}aszczyk, Will Howard, Lukas Aichberger, Chris Russell, Philip H. S. Torr, Adam Mahdi, Adel Bibi
arXiv:2607. 17291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents increasingly operate over the open web, where relevant records coexist with redundant summaries, outdated reports, and misleading documents.
By Jun Nie, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenheng Tang, Yonggang Zhang, Xiaowen Chu, Xinmei Tian, Bo Han