Claude's training has a cutoff, so there are questions it simply cannot answer from what it learned. It has two ways of going out to the live web to close that gap, and they are not the same thing. One is web search, which happens on its own whenever a question needs current information. The other is Research, which you ask for, and which spends a few minutes digging through a question before it reports back. Knowing which one a question deserves saves you time, and saves your usage allowance for the questions that need it.
Why Claude looks things up at all
A model knows what it was trained on. Anything that happened afterwards, whether a product release, a price change or last night's score, is outside that. Left to its own knowledge, Claude would answer confidently and be out of date.
In the current Claude there is nothing to switch on. The old web search toggle is gone, and Claude decides for itself when a question benefits from current information. You will see an indicator while it searches, and the answer comes back with citations attached, so you can check where each claim came from.
You can also point it at a specific page. Paste a URL into your message and Claude will fetch that page rather than going looking for one. When you already know the source, that is usually quicker than describing what you want.
Teams have one extra step. On Team and Enterprise plans, an Owner or Primary Owner has to enable web search for the whole workspace first, in Organization settings, under Capabilities. Until they do, nobody in the workspace gets it.
What web search is good at
Web search is the quick lookup. It suits questions that one or two searches can settle: the weather, a company's headquarters, this morning's headlines, who won last night's game. Claude searches, reads, answers, and moves on.
That limit of one or two searches is the useful way to think about it. If the answer exists on a page somewhere and you just need someone to go and get it, this is the tool, and it costs you roughly what an ordinary message costs.
What Research does differently
Research is not a bigger search. It is Claude working a question in stages. It runs a search, reads what comes back, decides what that tells it to look for next, and repeats. Each round is shaped by the last, which matters for questions whose answer is not sitting on any single page.
In practice it runs five or more searches over one to three minutes, then synthesizes what it found into a report, drawing on sources across the web and any integrations you have connected. You get a structured piece of writing rather than a paragraph, and every claim in it is cited.
Start it by typing /deep-research, or click the plus button below the chat input and choose Research. Two things to know first. It needs a paid plan: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise, on web, desktop or mobile. And it eats into your usage faster than a normal exchange, because it is pulling in and processing far more material.
One caveat if you are still on the older interface. There, web search is a toggle, and Research does not work unless it is turned on. In the current Claude the toggle is gone and there is nothing to check.
Choosing between them
The honest test is how many steps the answer needs.
If one or two lookups settle it, that is web search, and you will not have to ask: Claude will just do it. If the answer means gathering five or ten sources, weighing them against each other and writing up what they add up to, that is Research, and it earns the couple of minutes and the extra usage.
There is a third case that trips people up. Some hard questions need no new information at all: a math problem, a bug in your code, an argument you are trying to untangle. Those want thinking, not searching. Sending them to Research just wraps a reasoning problem in a pile of irrelevant web pages.
Always check the citations
Both tools cite their sources, and those citations are there to be used. Anthropic's own advice is not to treat Claude as a single source of truth, and that applies just as much to a sourced answer as an unsourced one.
Cited does not mean correct. A citation tells you where a claim came from, not whether that page was right, and not whether Claude read it the way you would have. On anything that matters, open the link. It takes seconds, and it is the difference between an answer that looks sourced and one you have actually verified.
Conclusion
Web search and Research answer different shapes of question. Web search is the reflex: a lookup or two, current facts, sources attached, nothing to set up. Research is the deliberate choice: minutes of searching that builds on itself, ending in a cited report, on a paid plan and at a real cost to your usage. Pick by the number of steps the answer needs, and read the citations either way.
Relevant Training
Web search, Research, and the judgment of when each one is worth using are covered in Starting with Claude, the first course in Cybrec's Claude AI training program.
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