An agentic retrieval system issues a sequence of search queries and must decide, at each step, whether the evidence collected so far is enough to stop.
Delegating that decision to an LLM verifier or a prompt judge makes stopping reliable, but the verifier then reprocesses the growing evidence after every retrieval step, a substantial repeated cost.
We show that most of these calls can be skipped without materially changing answer accuracy: a single threshold on a frozen sentence-embedding coverage margin detects the states in which the evidence is still plainly incomplete, and the verifier is called only on the ambiguous remainder, a gate we call CoVeR (Coverage-based Verifier Routing).
Across three multi-hop QA benchmarks, with the evaluation protocol fixed before the full-scale run, the CoVeR-gated agent matches the answer accuracy of both the full-budget agent and the always-verify baseline within a fraction of an EM point.
It cuts 62-68% of verifier calls, and 93% in a saturated regime.
Routers built on evidence counts, lexical overlap, or BM25 relevance, alone or learned in combination, give weaker overall trade-offs, the gate transfers without re-tuning across deciders and agent scales, and its drafter distills into a 921k-parameter head atop the frozen encoder, leaving no LLM in the routing loop.
The same signal cannot replace verification: matching a claim is far easier than deciding the claim is supported.