Semantics Delivery Network: Rethinking Web Retrieval Infrastructure for LLM Agents

arXiv:2609.22486v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly ground their answers in proprietary data and live web content through both single-shot retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multi-turn agentic search. Yet the web path they use was built for human readers: search services return URLs and snippets ranked by generic relevance, and content delivery networks (CDNs) cache URL-addressed objects without knowing which passage an agent needs. LLMs instead consume short, semantically coherent passages - hereafter, chunks - selected for downstream utility rather than similarity alone, retrieve statefully across reasoning turns, and, as uncoordinated streams, repeatedly fetch, clean, chunk, and embed the same content. We argue that semantic chunk retrieval should become a first-class network-delivery abstraction, and propose the Semantics Delivery Network (SemDN): an origin-authorized, hierarchical substrate that indexes, searches, and caches web content at chunk granularity, serving clients and origins alike. SemDN is more than finer-grained caching: it must estimate missing or stale evidence without an explicit miss signal, let clients choose retrieval representations that origins need not see, and share state among clients with the same representation. Preliminary results show that page-first retrieval processes two to three orders of magnitude more content than agents consume, that agentic queries exhibit task-local chunk reuse invisible to URL caches, and that chunk delivery improves answer quality per context token. We organize an open research agenda around shareable retrieval state, hierarchical caching and refresh under coverage risk, and deployability, including incentives, privacy, and verifiability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sarendis56/SemDN_HotNets26