Web search: when to leave it on.

LADLE has a web search toggle in the composer. It's off by default. Deliberately.

Web search is expensive — Anthropic charges a small fee per search, and a heavy-search subscriber can burn through their compute budget faster than a same-usage subscriber who leaves search off. That's the direct cost. There's also an indirect one: web search changes how the model behaves in ways that aren't always what you want.

When you leave search ON, the model treats every question as if it might need to look something up. That's great for "what's the latest on the CPI print" and terrible for "help me write a birthday message for my sister." In the second case, the model will do a search, find nothing useful, and produce a subtly stiffer reply than if it had just answered from what it knows.

Here's when to turn search ON: - Facts that change over time: current events, prices, availability, versions - Cited references you can click: research assistance where you want URLs, not just claims - Company or product research: model's knowledge cuts off; recent moves won't be in training - Anything where "the model might hallucinate a URL" is a live risk

Here's when to leave search OFF: - Writing drafts, edits, translations, tone work - Code that doesn't depend on a specific library version - Explaining concepts, working through problems, exploratory thinking - Personal or subjective tasks (advice, planning, brainstorming)

The rule of thumb: if the answer would be different in six months than it is today, turn search on. If the answer is timeless, leave it off.

There's a settings-level default too. Some users work in domains where search-on is right most of the time (journalists, researchers, competitive analysts). You can set search-on as your default in Settings → Behavior. It'll still be a toggle per chat if you want to flip it.

One caveat about how search works in LADLE. The tool is Anthropic's native web search — the model itself decides whether to invoke it, and how many queries to run per turn (we cap it at three per turn so a runaway search chain doesn't eat someone's budget). When it searches, you'll see a "SEARCHING · query" line render in the reply, then the answer with citation footnotes at the bottom.

Citations are real URLs from the search results, not fabricated ones. If you ever see a citation URL that 404s, that's Anthropic's search index temporarily out of sync with the live web — report it and we'll pass it along.

The composer toggle is one click. Get in the habit of flipping it on for research turns and off for drafting turns. Two months in, the users who report best experience are the ones who use search deliberately, not the ones who leave it on or off permanently.