Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said in its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon. Users can toggle on web search in their profile settings from the Claude web app, and Claude will automatically search across sites to inform certain responses.

For now, web search only works with the latest Anthropic model powering Claude, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic said.

“When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses, it provides direct citations so you can easily fact-check sources,” the company wrote in its blog post. “Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format. This enhancement expands Claude’s extensive knowledge base with real-time insights, providing answers based on more current information.”

In my brief testing of the feature, web search didn’t consistently trigger for current events-related questions. But when it did, Claude indeed delivered an answer with inline citations, pulling from sources, including social media (e.g., X) and new sources like NPR and Reuters.

Searching through web sources with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.Image Credits:Anthropic

Claude’s ability to search the web brings it to feature parity with most rival AI-powered chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Mistral’s Le Chat. Anthropic’s argument against it, previously, was that Claude was “designed to be self-contained.” No doubt competitive pressure had something to do with the reversal in course.

Of course, the risk is that Claude hallucinates or mis-cites web sources. Other chatbots suffer from this. According to a recent study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, popular chatbots, including ChatGPT and Gemini provide incorrect answers to more than 60% of questions. A separate report from The Guardian found that ChatGPT’s search-focused experience, ChatGPT Search, can be fooled into generating completely misleading summaries.