Anthropic is adding web search to its Claude chatbot in a very smart way

Anthropic announced Thursday that it has added web search capability to its Claude chatbot. It’s not a new feature to the AI world—but the company’s approach stands as one of the most thoughtful to date.

Much like Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude works relevant information from the web into a conversational answer, and includes clickable source citations. 

Web search is available as a “feature preview” for U.S. users of the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, with plans to expand to the free tier and to more countries.

What sets Anthropic’s web search feature apart is that it is automatic. Rather than requiring users to manually select a web search on a given query (as with OpenAI’s ChatGPT), Claude decides on its own whether fetching web data would improve an answer. 

“Our north star is that you should ask Claude a question and it should be able to do whatever you want it to do, finding the information that’s necessary across whatever sources it has access to,” says Scott White, who leads development of the web version of Claude (Claud.ai). “The way that we’ve designed web search is that when you turn it on, it’s always on, and Claude will decide when it thinks it makes sense to do it.” 

After it receives a time-sensitive question, Claude may generate an initial answer from its training data and then state: “. . . but let me search for more precise information since this could have changed.” 

That matters since, without web search enabled, the results are subject to a cutoff date in the large language model’s training data. Claude’s training data only goes up to October 2024, while ChatGPT’s (using GPT-4o) goes up to June 2024. That’s why ChatGPT (without web search turned on) returns outdated information when asked, for example, to identify which major AI chatbots have web search: It mentions Google Bard, for example—even though that product has since been renamed Gemini. With the web search button clicked on, all these errors disappear.

(An OpenAI spokesperson points out that ChatGPT will automatically do a web search for questions that imply a need for up-to-date information, such as, “What are the best travel destinations for 2025?” But as per the example above, the web search doesn’t always kick in when the results would benefit. Users can also regenerate an answer with web search turned on.)

Claude can also apply its reasoning abilities to web search, White says. “Sometimes after it searches the web it’ll read the responses and the answers and say ‘Hmm, did I answer the question or not?’” he says. “Then it’ll go out and do a couple more searches to make sure. So it feels like it’s checking its work.”

A web search is almost always helpful for a reality check on whatever information the chatbot surfaces. That’s why Anthropic’s move was a smart one: It removes the burden from users to determine whether a query would benefit from a specialized search.

Adding web search will certainly make Claude a more useful and reliable chatbot, but the move could have more commercial implications, too. People are increasingly using Claude to research products, and referrals from Claude to brand sites could become a key revenue source for Anthropic.

“Anthropic is creating new entry points that complement how people are already using LLMs, and it’s working,” says Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, an SEO and digital performance platform. BrightEdge data shows that Claude’s referrals to websites jumped 82% month-over-month in February, outpacing ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others. “Claude has historically lagged in this space, but this is a move that could finally put them in the game,” Yu says.

Within the chatbot context, web search is used to take a quick snapshot of relevant information from the web to inform a response to a specific question. This is different from AI research agents like Google’s Deep Research tool within the Gemini assistant and OpenAI’s tool, also called Deep Research, both of which consult a broad group of sources using a defined and customizable research strategy. 

Anthropic doesn’t yet offer a “deep research” tool but that’s likely coming. Augmenting chatbot answers with web search information is a logical first step toward that.