Claude Gets Search--But Don't Celebrate Yet

This week, Anthropic took a huge step by adding live web search to Claude 3.7 Sonnet. But if you’re a web creator, don’t celebrate yet.

At least in my early testing, Claude did cite its source when search is enabled, but it tended to cite the root domain of a site, rather than a specific article.

Suppose you ran a search, find a news article about a new burrito place on my Bay Area Telegraph site via Claude, and tried to click through to read my article.

Claude would often take you to the homepage of Bay Area Telegraph, not the actual article. You’d have to comb through the whole site to find the piece of content you were looking for.

It’s not ideal. Hopefully they’ll fix it, or users are unlikely to follow the citations.

So You Like HQs, Eh?

My video showing the real-life HQ of OpenAI in San Francisco was surprisingly popular!

I wouldn’t have guessed that ya’ll like to see AI companies’ real-world homes so much.

Would anyone want a video “walking tour” of the most powerful AI companies in the world, as seen through their campuses (from the outside, since no one is about to let me see the top secret interiors)?

Reply and let me know.

Using Deep Research to Predict Philz Coffee’s Mystery Drink

Philz Coffee, a popular Bay Area brand, is known for teasing mysterious new drinks on social media, and then revealing them a few days later.

When they teased a new “Nirvana” drink this morning, I handed their announcement to OpenAI’s Deep Research function to try and predict what the drink will be.

The results are awesome—and show the power of Deep Research.

Will the system be right? We’ll find out on March 25!

Is AI Search Syphoning Off the Best Users?

Adobe recently looked at 1 trillion datapoints to see how well people who visit ecommerce sites via AI search engines convert.

Turns out, really well! It appears that AI search engines might be siphoning off the best users who are most likely to buy things or engage with content, and directing them to publishers’ sites.

If that’s the case, you absolutely need to get into these AI search engines as a creator.

Jared and I share lots more on this week’s Niche Pursuits podcast.