PeopleSearchBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating AI-Powered People Search Platforms

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 29 Mar 2026] PeopleSearchBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating AI-Powered People Search Platforms Wei Wang, Tianyu Shi, Shuai Zhang, Boyang Xia, Zequn Xie, Chenyu Zeng, Qi Zhang, Lynn Ai, Yaqi Yu, Kaiming Zhang, Feiyue Tang AI-powered people search platforms are increasingly used in recruiting, sales prospecting, and professional networking, yet no widely accepted benchmark exists for evaluating their performance. We introduce PeopleSearchBench, an open-source benchmark that compares four people search platforms on 119 real-world queries across four use cases: corporate recruiting, B2B sales prospecting, expert search with deterministic answers, and influencer/KOL discovery. A key contribution is Criteria-Grounded Verification, a factual relevance pipeline that extracts explicit, verifiable criteria from each query and uses live web search to determine whether returned people satisfy them. This produces binary relevance judgments grounded in factual verification rather than subjective holistic LLM-as-judge scores. We evaluate systems on three dimensions: Relevance Precision (padded nDCG@10), Effective Coverage (task completion and qualified result yield), and Information Utility (profile completeness and usefulness), averaged equally into an overall score. Lessie, a specialized AI people search agent, performs best overall, scoring 65.2, 18.5% higher than the second-ranked system, and is the only system to achieve 100% task completion across all 119 queries. We also report confidence intervals, human validation of the verification pipeline (Cohen's kappa = 0.84), ablations, and full documentation of queries, prompts, and normalization procedures. Code, query definitions, and aggregated results are available on GitHub. Comments: 25 pages Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2603.27476 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.27476v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.27476 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Wei Wang [view email] [v1] Sun, 29 Mar 2026 02:21:09 UTC (5,742 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)