How Agentic Search Actually Works: The Research Loop Link-Fetching Agents Miss

How Agentic Search Actually Works: The Research Loop Link-Fetching Agents Miss Most agent tutorials show you the same pattern: take a user query, call a search API, grab the top result, stuff the text into your prompt. Done. Ship it. That works fine for trivia. It falls apart when the question requires synthesis across multiple sources, when the first result is a listicle with no substance, or when the answer depends on information that only shows up three clicks deep into a documentation site. The difference between a link-fetching agent and a genuinely useful research agent is the loop.