Anthropic has officially launched a web search feature for its AI chatbot Claude, enabling the assistant to access and process real-time information from the internet. The new capability, which addresses one of the most requested features from users, is currently available in preview for paid Claude users in the United States, with plans to expand to free users and additional countries soon.
The web search functionality works with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic’s latest model. When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses, it provides direct citations to sources, allowing users to easily fact-check the information. Instead of users having to find search results themselves, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format.
“With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data,” Anthropic stated in its announcement.
Business applications
Anthropic highlighted several business use cases for the web-enabled Claude:
- Sales teams can analyze industry trends to learn about key initiatives and pain points, transforming account planning and driving higher win rates
- Financial analysts can assess current market data, earnings reports, and industry trends to make better investment decisions
- Researchers can build stronger grant proposals and literature reviews by searching across primary sources
- Shoppers can compare product features, prices, and reviews across multiple sources
This update brings Claude to feature parity with competing AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Mistral’s Le Chat, which already offer web search capabilities.
Technical implementation
Unlike traditional search engines that return a list of links, Claude processes search results and delivers them in a conversational format. Users simply toggle on web search in their profile settings, and Claude will automatically search the internet when needed to inform its responses.
In early testing of the feature, web search didn’t consistently trigger for all current events-related questions, but when it did, Claude delivered answers with inline citations pulling from various sources including social media and news outlets like NPR and Reuters.
As with other AI chatbots with search capabilities, there is a risk that Claude could hallucinate or mis-cite web sources. A recent study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that popular chatbots provide incorrect answers to more than 60% of questions, highlighting the ongoing challenges in this area.
Sources: Anthropic, TechCrunch, VentureBeat