Anthropic has added web search capabilities to Claude, its AI-powered chatbot, in a move to bring its AI assistant up to speed with competitors. Evidence suggests this new feature is powered by Brave Search, the search engine maintained by browser developer Brave.
Unlike some competitors, Claude’s approach to web search is automatic and thoughtful. Rather than requiring users to manually activate web search for specific queries (as ChatGPT does), Claude intelligently decides when fetching information from the web 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,” explained Scott White, who leads development of the web version of Claude.
When Claude determines that current information would be valuable, it might generate an initial response from its training data and then add: “…but let me search for more precise information since this could have changed.”
This is particularly important since Claude’s training data only extends to October 2024.
What makes Claude’s implementation unique is its ability to apply reasoning to web searches.
According to White, “Sometimes after it searches the web it’ll read the responses and the answers and say ‘Hmm, did I answer the question or not?’ Then it’ll go out and do a couple more searches to make sure. So it feels like it’s checking its work.”
While Anthropic hasn’t officially confirmed its search partner, several pieces of evidence point to Brave Search as the engine behind Claude’s new feature. Such evidence includes:
- Anthropic added “Brave Search” to its “subprocessor list” – the list of partners who process Claude data
- Identical citations have been observed between Claude and Brave search results
- Claude’s web search function contains a parameter called “BraveSearchParams”
Brave already powers web search for Mistral’s chatbot platform Le Chat, having announced that partnership in February.
The addition of web search not only makes Claude more useful but could have considerable commercial implications.
According to Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge (an SEO and digital performance platform), Claude’s referrals to websites increased by 82% month-over-month in February, outpacing competitors like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Currently, the web search feature 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.
While Anthropic doesn’t yet offer a “deep research” tool like Google’s and OpenAI’s Deep Research features, that functionality is likely coming in the future.
