Anthropic has released web search for Claude. This has been much rumored of late and is now live (opt-in) for paid accounts.

Claude bucks the trend for recent AI search or "search assistant" features: it makes it clear when it is searching the web, it exposes the search terms being used, and it exposes the underlying search results even when it chooses not to cite some of them. Claude is forthcoming about the underlying search tool being used, which is Brave Search. (This is in line with other tools in Claude: Anthropic typically documents capabilities very thoroughly in the Claude system prompt. Works less well in other AI tools.)

The results for my exploratory queries line up very closely with Brave's top organic results suggesting Claude is not doing much, if any, re-ranking on top of the underlying search results. This will likely be a relief to the SEO and site operator community -- compared to ChatGPT Search, Grok, etc. there is a minimal amount of "black box" behavior going on here.

It does not appear that Claude is doing web content retrieval in real time. Unlike ChatGPT Search, there's no indication that a bot is accessing content when a particular page is cited. That suggests that stored (cached) page content, in addition to SERP metadata, is being made available to Claude. This may also be via Brave Search.

For site operators, the indexing story with Brave Search is a little complicated. Brave explicitly does not support a robots.txt identifier you can use to permit or deny Brave indexing. Instead, they follow whatever rules sites have set up for Googlebot and will also obey noindex directives on specific pages. Read more about Brave’s documentation on their crawler (search indexing bot).

I'm pretty stoked for this -- like many developers, I use Claude a lot. Although ChatGPT has a much larger consumer brand, at this point Claude is probably among the biggest "developer influencers" on the internet.

If you have questions about Claude Search, let me know and I'll try to help. If you're a site operator or marketer who is concerned about how Claude is using your content or representing your brand, reach out to us at Scrunch AI.

Helpful Resources:

• Brave’s documentation on their crawler (search indexing bot): https://search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler
• Anthropic announcement: https://www.anthropic.com/news/web-search