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GPT Researcher x Deep Agents: 2x the verified evidence, same harness

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GPT Researcher x Deep Agents: 2x the verified evidence, same harness

A shareable summary of the new Deep Agents example and its benchmark results. Full details: example, BENCHMARK.md.

What we built

We plugged GPT Researcher into LangChain's Deep Agents as the research engine: a chief-editor deep agent plans a report outline with write_todos, spawns parallel researcher subagents, and each subagent calls GPT Researcher's full pipeline (deep_research) to produce a cited section draft. The harness handles orchestration; GPT Researcher handles evidence. It reproduces the STORM-style pipeline of our 8-agent LangGraph example in a fraction of the code, and works over the web, local documents (PDF/DOCX/md), or both.

What we measured

The obvious question: does swapping the quickstart's raw search tool for GPT Researcher actually make the agent's research better? We ran both on DeepResearch Bench (RACE report quality + FACT citation verification, 10 topic-stratified tasks), keeping everything else identical - same create_deep_agent harness, same gpt-5.4 model, same system prompt, same step budget. The only variable was the research tooling.

MetricDeep agent + raw Tavily searchDeep agent + GPT Researcher
RACE report quality0.5030.512
Citations per report34.562.9
Effective (verified) citations per report18.635.2 (+89%)
Citation precision53.9%56.0%
Per-task wins (verified citations)3/107/10

Every citation was verified by the official FACT pipeline: extract the claim, fetch the cited page, judge whether the page supports the claim. So this isn't "more links" - it's ~2x the claims a reader can actually verify, at equal-or-better report quality and higher precision. For calibration, 35 effective citations per report is in the range DeepResearch Bench reports for dedicated deep research products (OpenAI Deep Research ~40), while plain LLM + search-tool setups typically land at 5-15.

Accuracy and breadth, not just depth

  • No accuracy tax: on quick single-fact lookups (SimpleQA, n=30) the two setups score at parity (83.3% vs 83.3%) - the heavier pipeline costs nothing on simple lookups.
  • Blind judge preference: in a pairwise report comparison on 8 topics (sides randomized), an LLM judge preferred the GPT Researcher agent's report 5 of 8 times, with more distinct sources cited (24.5 vs 19.5 unique URLs) at comparable length.
  • Breadth beyond the web: with GPT Researcher's hybrid mode, the same agent researches private documents alongside the web. On a due-diligence task over a realistic fictional internal corpus (27 files: PDFs, DOCX, distractors, stale archived vintages - no leakage from the public web possible), it recovered up to 94% of internal-document facts vs 0% for the raw-search agent. Even the DIY alternative - mounting the corpus on the deep agent's own file tools - averages only 62.5%: it has to guess which files to read, cannot parse DOCX, and sometimes trusts an archived vintage. GPT Researcher's format-aware parsing and embedding retrieval make it both higher and consistent, at equal public-web fact coverage.

Why it works

A raw search tool returns snippets, so the writing model cites whatever the search API surfaced and fills gaps from memory. GPT Researcher plans sub-queries, scrapes and reads the full pages, filters content by relevance, and hands the agent pre-cited synthesis - so what reaches the final report is grounded in sources that were actually read.

Reproduce it

Everything ships in the repo: the agent builders, a generation script that emits DeepResearch Bench-format reports for both setups, and a small patch adding an OpenAI judge backend to the official scoring harness. See BENCHMARK.md for the three commands.