You.com Launches 'Highlights' Web Search Mode, Claiming 95.17% on SimpleQA

You.com introduced a new extraction mode for its Web Search API called Highlights on September 1, 2026. [1] Setting the `extraction_mode` parameter to `highlights` replaces default snippets with an array containing passages that specifically address the query. [1] A model identifies text spans that answer the query and returns them verbatim, preserving formatting for numbers, dates, tables, and code blocks. [1]

On the SimpleQA benchmark, You.com reported the Highlights feature reached a score of 95.17% with a 695ms p50 latency. [1] The feature also scored 66.93% on the RetrievalQA benchmark, though it scored slightly lower than full-page extraction on the FRAMES multi-hop reasoning test. [1] The new mode increases the cost per question by roughly 11% compared to standard snippets, but the cost per correct answer is about 5% lower. [1]

By offering targeted passage extraction rather than raw full-page returns or generic keyword snippets, You.com is optimizing for retrieval accuracy while controlling downstream LLM token costs. The reported 695ms latency provides a significant speed advantage compared to competitors like Exa and Parallel, which also cleared the 95% accuracy mark on SimpleQA but took substantially longer to return results. What the sources don't address: How the API performs on highly unstructured or dynamically rendered web pages that resist standard targeted passage extraction.