Anthropic is adding web search capabilities to its AI assistant, Claude, to provide more up-to-date information. Unlike traditional search engines, Claude will translate online search results into conversational answers, accurately citing sources, similar to features already available in Perplexity, ChatGPT's search function, and Google Gemini.
Currently, this web search functionality is only available to paying users in the US participating in the feature preview, and only for the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. Anthropic uses a reasoning model to ensure accuracy and plans to expand this feature to other countries and free accounts in the future.
As AI assistants become increasingly similar, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Deepseek, and Mistral now offer comparable services at similar prices. When one platform introduces a new feature, others typically follow within weeks. The real differences currently lie in AI model performance and prompt usability, but these distinctions are mainly meaningful to professional users and developers. In the future, a platform's advantage may lie in allowing users to choose the most suitable AI model for different tasks.
However, chatbot-based search also presents challenges. Beyond accuracy concerns, website owners face a more serious predicament: when users get information through a chatbot, their likelihood of visiting the original website drops significantly. Traffic can decrease by as much as 96% compared to traditional search engines. This poses a severe problem for websites relying on traffic for revenue.
It's noteworthy that, unlike most competitors, Anthropic has not yet secured licensing agreements with media companies when using their current articles as sources for its chatbot responses.
