Which Research Tool to Use

What it is

Documentation update — 7 October 2026. In the unified experience, web search is automatic with no toggle. Start Research with /deep-research or + → Research. The toggle instructions below apply to the older interface.

Claude has three distinct tools for going beyond a single quick answer: web search, extended thinking, and Research. They overlap in theme but not in use. This page is the short decision guide.

Rule of thumb:

Need fresh facts? → Web search.
Need hard thinking, no fresh info? → Extended thinking.
Need a report across many sources? → Research.

Where to find it

The inspected unified + menus show Research but no Web search toggle.

All three are reached from the composer, but from two different controls.

On desktop

Research is in the composer’s + menu beside Memory; unified web search is automatic.
Extended thinking isn’t a toggle — it’s the Effort setting inside the model picker, opened from the model button next to the composer.

On the web

Research is in the + menu on claude.ai, and Effort is in the model picker. No Web search toggle is present.

How to use it

These steps apply to the older interface. Use the unified-experience instructions above if your account has migrated.

Pick web search when

The question is factual and current: the weather, recent news headlines, details about a specific company, “who won the game last night?”
One or two lookups will answer it.
You want to steer the search — tell Claude roughly what to look for and let it run the searches and analyse the results.

Pick extended thinking when

The problem is about reasoning, not retrieval: maths, debugging code, analysing a philosophical argument.
No information from the web is needed.
You want Claude to explore several angles before committing to an answer — “optimise this algorithm for better performance”, say.

Pick Research when

You need a thorough report synthesised from many sources, with citations.
The question warrants five or more tool calls over one to three minutes.
Examples from Anthropic: comparing business competitors, updating an outdated internal document with information from the web, prioritising action items across your calendar and email.

Combine Research and extended thinking

They’re designed to pair. Together, Claude plans its approach carefully and then executes the information-gathering — useful for researching an emerging technology for a business proposal, or working across several scientific papers.

Good to know

Older interfaces require web search to be on. Anthropic’s Research article is unambiguous: “You must have web search turned on for research to function.” If Research isn’t doing anything, that’s the first thing to check.
Research burns through your limits faster. It’s subject to the same limits as a standard conversation, but a research session uses them up more quickly, because Claude is retrieving multiple sources and writing a longer answer.
Research draws on your integrations as well as the web, so what it can reach depends on which connectors you’ve set up.
Research produces a longer final report with proper citations, rather than a conversational answer.
Extended thinking alone won’t fetch anything. If the answer depends on information Claude doesn’t already have, web search or Research is what you want.

What’s changed recently

2026-09-13 — “Where to find it” rewritten: Web search and Research are tick-box items in the composer’s + menu on both desktop and the web, and extended thinking is the Effort setting in the model picker, not a toggle. Our previous description — toggles under a tools slider and a dedicated Research button in the bottom left — no longer matches either platform. One claim has been dropped as unsupported — that enabling Research turns extended thinking on automatically, which neither Anthropic article states. Two others that were briefly dropped are back and now carry the right source: Research needs web search switched on, and a research session uses up your limits faster. Both are stated plainly in “Use Research on Claude”, which this page had not been citing; the decision guide it did cite is simply silent on them, which is not the same as contradicting them.