# Beyond Semantic Similarity: Performance and Costs of Agentic Retrieval for Complex Tasks > Source: > Published: 2026-10-06 18:00:02+00:00 Modern information systems, including many agentic workflows, use dense retrieval to explore large amounts of unstructured data. However, dense retrieval relies on surface-level semantic similarity, which is insufficient for increasingly complex search applications. Here, we investigate agentic retr