When Claude searches the web to find information, the responses will show inline citations for the sources.
To use the feature, users will have to toggle on web search in profile settings
Photo Credit: Anthropic
Anthropic announced the rollout of the web search functionality for Claude on Thursday. The San Francisco-based AI firm released the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot in March 2023, but so far, it could not access the Internet to find real-time information, and only had to rely on its internal knowledge database. This is now set to change as the company is finally adding the capability across web, mobile, and desktop apps. At present, the functionality is available in preview and is used only when Claude deems it necessary.
In a newsroom post, the AI firm announced the addition of the new functionality. Interestingly, Claude is the only major AI chatbot that cannot access the Internet. Other rivals, including Gemini, ChatGPT, Meta AI, Copilot, and DeepSeek, have had this feature for quite some time now. Earlier, the company justified the decision by stating that Claude is “designed to be self-contained.”
With the web search capability, Claude will now be able to access the Internet to look for information about the latest events. Anthropic claimed that the new feature will boost “its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data.” The feature is currently available in preview to the paid subscribers of the platform in the US. The AI firm stated that it plans to expand web search to more countries and the free tier in the future.
To use the feature, users will have to pick the Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model from the model picker menu in the text box. They will also have to navigate to profile settings and toggle on the web search option. After this, making a query about a topic that requires real-time information will trigger the web search functionality. Notably, users cannot manually trigger the feature, and Claude will decide whether accessing the Internet is necessary or not.
When Claude shows responses that include information from the web, it will show inline citations to let users verify the source and deep dive into the topic. The sources are also displayed on top of the response in a dropdown menu as well as a new box that shows the searched query as well as large boxes that show both the URL and page headline.
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