Anthropic’s Claude AI Now Offers Real-Time Web Search

The American AI company Anthropic announced that its flagship AI model Claude is now able to search the web to provide up-to-date answers. The feature is currently available only to paid members in the United States.

According to Anthropic’s announcement, Claude will provide direct citations that can be quickly verified as it will also provide the sources.

“With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data,” shared the company.

The new feature allows the chatbot to access more information, understand the latest events, and enhance its accuracy.

“Web search is available now in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the United States,” states the document. “Support for users on our free plan and more countries is coming soon.”

Paid members interested in trying Claude’s new feature must enable the web search option in the profile setting and interact with the chatbot. Free users must wait for the feature a bit longer for access.

Claude can now search the web.

Each response includes inline citations, so you can also verify the sources. pic.twitter.com/iFshgfUEp8

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) March 20, 2025

Anthropic also suggested multiple use cases for the search feature. The company explained that it can help sales teams analyze trends for planning and learn about key initiatives and pain points; assist financial analysts in making better investment decisions; support researchers in identifying trends and gaps in the available literature; and enable shoppers to compare products and make more informed decisions.

Other AI companies have been providing similar services. OpenAI launched its search feature in November 2024, and Perplexity was launched in 2022 including searching capabilities since its debut.

The new search feature for Claude arrives just a few days after the New York Times revealed Google is planning on investing $750 million in the company this year—after it has already invested $3 billion. And, just a few weeks ago, the AI startup launched the latest version of its chatbot Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking capabilities.