Preprint · 2025

An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents

Tianci Xue, Weijian Qi, Tianneng Shi, Chan Hee Song, Boyu Gou, Dawn Song, Huan Sun, Yu Su

Abstract

As digitalization and cloud technologies evolve, the web is becoming increasingly important in the modern society. Autonomous web agents based on large language models (LLMs) hold a great potential in work automation. It is therefore important to accurately measure and monitor the progression of their capabilities. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the current state of web agents. Our results depict a very different picture of the competency of current agents, suggesting over-optimism in previously reported results. This gap can be attributed to shortcomings in existing benchmarks. We introduce Online-Mind2Web, an online evaluation benchmark consisting of 300 diverse and realistic tasks spanning 136 websites. It enables us to evaluate web agents under a setting that approximates how real users use these agents. To facilitate more scalable evaluation and development, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method and show that it can achieve around 85% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing methods. Finally, we present the first comprehensive comparative analysis of current web agents, highlighting both their strengths and limitations to inspire future research.

BibTeX Copy

@misc{xue_illusion_2025,
	title = {An {Illusion} of {Progress}? {Assessing} the {Current} {State} of {Web} {Agents}},
	shorttitle = {An {Illusion} of {Progress}?},
	url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01382},
	doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2504.01382},
	abstract = {As digitalization and cloud technologies evolve, the web is becoming increasingly important in the modern society. Autonomous web agents based on large language models (LLMs) hold a great potential in work automation. It is therefore important to accurately measure and monitor the progression of their capabilities. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the current state of web agents. Our results depict a very different picture of the competency of current agents, suggesting over-optimism in previously reported results. This gap can be attributed to shortcomings in existing benchmarks. We introduce Online-Mind2Web, an online evaluation benchmark consisting of 300 diverse and realistic tasks spanning 136 websites. It enables us to evaluate web agents under a setting that approximates how real users use these agents. To facilitate more scalable evaluation and development, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method and show that it can achieve around 85\% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing methods. Finally, we present the first comprehensive comparative analysis of current web agents, highlighting both their strengths and limitations to inspire future research.},
	urldate = {2026-11-06},
	publisher = {arXiv},
	author = {Xue, Tianci and Qi, Weijian and Shi, Tianneng and Song, Chan Hee and Gou, Boyu and Song, Dawn and Sun, Huan and Su, Yu},
	month = oct,
	year = {2025},
	note = {arXiv:2504.01382 [cs.AI]},
	keywords = {Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science - Computation and Language},
}