Decoupled Search Grounding

Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG): vendor-agnostic MCP-compatible architecture for LLM agent retrieval

Researchers introduce Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), an architecture that moves real-time search grounding outside the reasoning model via an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, caching, and retrieval-depth as explicit controls. Evaluated across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, DSG nearly matches native search accuracy on SimpleQA (86.1% vs. 87.7%) while achieving 91% lower search cost and 68% lower latency via a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate. In a production e-commerce deployment, DSG cuts search cost by over 98% while matching or slightly exceeding native-search accuracy. The work frames real-time grounding as an optimizable interface boundary rather than a fixed model feature, with direct relevance to MCP-based agent infrastructure.