Research that finishes while you are in a meeting

You have been avoiding a project for a week. Your team is planning an offsite and you need venue options that fit a specific budget, accommodate fifty people across meetings, meals, and activities, and reflect the tone your leadership team wants. You already know this is three hours of browser tabs and comparison tables you never actually finish. This is exactly where Research mode earns its keep.

Research is an advanced agentic feature in Claude that conducts systematic, multi-source investigation. Instead of running a single search and returning a single result, Claude acts as an autonomous research assistant — planning an approach, running multiple searches that build on each other, exploring different angles, and compiling the findings into a comprehensive report with citations.

Work that would normally eat your afternoon finishes while you are in a meeting, and when you come back there is a report waiting with sources you can actually verify.

What makes Research different

A regular chat answer is roughly one search and one response. Research is an agentic loop. Claude autonomously decides what to search next based on what it has already found, pursuing leads and filling gaps without you directing each step.

Four things happen under the hood:

1. Claude plans its approach. When Research is enabled, extended thinking is automatically turned on. Claude breaks your request into sub-questions, identifies what information it needs, and plans how to investigate different angles.
2. Claude runs multiple searches. Each search builds on what the previous one found. Claude decides what to investigate next, pursues promising leads, and fills in gaps you did not know were there.
3. Claude synthesises findings. Information from the web and any connected integrations (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and so on) gets compiled into a single, well-organised report.
4. Claude cites every claim. Every statement in a Research report links back to its source, so you can verify and dig deeper whenever you want.

Most reports finish in 5 to 15 minutes. Complex investigations can take up to 45 minutes — work that would typically require hours of manual research. In the meantime, Claude runs in the background and you get on with other work.

When to use Research (and when not to)

Research is powerful, but it is not the right tool for every question. A quick decision map:

Use Research when you need:

• A comprehensive report synthesising information from multiple sources.
• In-depth analysis across the web and your connected tools.
• Work that would normally take hours of manual gathering.
• Comparative analysis — vendors, competitors, venues, options.
• A report with citations you can verify.

Use plain web search instead when:

• You need a quick, specific fact (today's stock price, a company's address).
• The answer only needs one or two sources.
• Speed matters more than comprehensiveness.

Use extended thinking on its own when:

• You need deep reasoning on a complex problem that does not require outside information.
• You are debugging code, working through a maths problem, or reasoning through a logical puzzle.

Use Enterprise Search when:

• The answer lives inside your organisation's tools, not the public web.
• You are onboarding, learning a policy, or catching up on internal work.

Research is ideal for market analysis, competitive research, planning complex events, technical documentation synthesis, and preparing briefings that need current, verified information. Anything where the shape of the task is "collect and compare across many sources".

How to use it

Enabling Research is two clicks.

1. Find the Research button in the lower-left of the chat interface.
2. Click to enable — the button turns blue when Research is active.
3. Enter your prompt and submit.

Claude works in the background. You will see progress indicators as it searches, reads, and synthesises. You can switch to another task and come back when it is done.

Important. Web search must be enabled for Research to function. If you have not already turned on web search, do so in your Search and tools settings before running Research.

Writing a prompt worth a 20-minute run

Because Research takes time, the quality of your prompt determines how much of that time is useful. Treat your prompt as a brief, not a search query.

Be specific about your goals. Instead of "tell me about the EV market," try "analyse the electric vehicle battery market — identify key players, technology trends, and supply chain challenges that might affect investment decisions."

Specify the sections or structure you want. Claude will organise its findings around the structure you provide. "Compare venue options for a team offsite, including location and accessibility, meeting space and amenities, catering options, and pricing considerations."

Include relevant constraints. Budget ranges, timelines, geographic requirements, team sizes. Constraints keep Research focused on options that are actually viable.

Ask Claude to help refine your prompt. If you are not sure how to frame a Research question, ask Claude to help you write a better Research prompt before enabling the feature. Five minutes of prompt sharpening saves twenty minutes of re-running a report you did not quite mean to ask for.

Research with connected integrations

When you have Google Workspace or other integrations connected, Research gets significantly more powerful. Claude can pull context from your emails, calendar, and documents alongside web research.

Useful patterns:

• "Summarise what's been discussed about Project X across my emails and Slack, then research industry best practices for similar initiatives."
• "Review my calendar commitments for next week and research each company I'm meeting with."
• "Find all internal documents about our pricing strategy and compare to how competitors are positioning themselves."

You can steer Claude explicitly — "pull relevant context from my Google Drive" or "include insights from my recent emails on this topic".

Pro tip. You can also turn web search off to do internal-only research across your connected tools. "What did our team discuss about the Q3 launch across Slack and Docs?" becomes a purely internal investigation.

Before you move on

Think of one research task you have been putting off because it would take too long to gather the sources. That is your first Research prompt. Take five minutes to write the brief — structure, constraints, success criteria — then let Claude spend fifteen on the actual work.