Anthropic is introducing web search capabilities to its AI assistant Claude, an innovative move aims to provide users with more timely and accurate information. Unlike traditional search engines, Claude converts online search results into conversational answers, while accurately labeling the source of information, similar to the search functions of Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini. This conversational search not only improves the user experience, but also makes information acquisition more efficient and intuitive.
Currently, this web search feature is only available to paid US users participating in feature previews and is only available for the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. Anthropic chose to use inference models to ensure the accuracy of search results and plans to promote this feature to other countries and free account users in the future. This strategy not only helps to gradually optimize functions, but also tests and verifys their effectiveness on a larger scale.
With the increasing convergence of major AI assistant functions, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Deepseek and Mistral are now offering similar services at similar prices. When one platform launches new features, other platforms usually follow up within weeks. At present, the real difference between platforms is mainly in the performance of AI models and the ease of use of tips, but these differences are mainly meaningful to professional users and developers. In the future, the advantage of the platform may be to allow users to choose the most appropriate AI model for different tasks, which will further improve user experience and satisfaction.
However, chatbot-based search also presents challenges. Apart from the accuracy issue, website owners are facing a more serious dilemma: When users get information through chatbots, their likelihood of accessing the original website is significantly reduced, with traffic potentially up to 96% lower than traditional search engines. This is a serious problem for websites that rely on visits to earn revenue. How to balance the relationship between the convenience of AI assistants and website traffic will be an important issue that needs to be solved in the future.
It is worth noting that unlike most competitors, Anthropic has not yet reached an authorization agreement with media companies when using current articles from media companies as the source of their chatbot answers. This practice may cause disputes over copyright and intellectual property rights, and Anthropic needs to negotiate with relevant media companies as soon as possible to ensure the legality and sustainability of its services.