Search built for agents doesn't look like search built for humans
In July 2026, Amazon Bedrock shipped a managed knowledge base built specifically for agentic search, not human search.
A human search box expects one query and one ranked list back.
An agent needs something else entirely.
It decomposes a question into sub-queries, runs them together, weighs what comes back, and decides whether to search again before it ever produces an answer.
Retrieval infrastructure designed for the first case breaks under the second.
The pivot is that retrieval is no longer one system with two consumers.
It is becoming two systems that happen to share a data source.
• Human search optimizes for one great answer, fast
• Agent search optimizes for enough context, across many steps, to reason correctly
A single index tuned for click-through will not survive a multi-step agent query.
It was never built for one.
The teams shipping agent products first are the ones rebuilding retrieval first.
Everyone else is still tuning search for a box nobody types into anymore.