New to n8n - How do I enable web search in Claude Sonnet 4?

Questions
1

Describe the problem/error/question

I want to send a request to Anthropic Claude 4 Sonnet (maybe Opus 4.1 in future) but it’s critical for the query to work that it has web_search enabled as per the API ( Web search tool - Anthropic ) but I can’t see an option for it in the UI and no way to manually “inject” JSON into the request.

It’s also important that I also have extended thinking enabled too ( Building with extended thinking - Anthropic ) as it’s a ‘research’ request.

I know that I could use SerpApi seemingly to achieve the same result, but why would I pay them for API requests when Claude has the ability built-in?!

What is the error message (if any)?

No error message, simply can’t do it.

Please share your workflow

Not really a lot to see, but you get the idea…

Screenshot 2025-08-15 at 10.13.01
Screenshot 2025-08-15 at 10.13.01566×429 16.4 KB

Share the output returned by the last node

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version:
    1.106.3
  • Database (default: SQLite): SQLite
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): Docker
  • Operating system: Ubuntu
2

Hey, I guess there is no way to use Claude’s built-in tools in n8n. If you want to enable web search for free, I suggest you to use the MCP servers. You can use Google Search MCP server + Firecrawl MCP server (you can get 150K~ token for free via Elevenlabs).

With this implementation, Claude can search for anything in Google and crawl pages via Firecrawl. You can use another crawler instead of Firecrawl tho.

3

Hi, that’s absolutely correct. The LLM Claude AI Agent mode doesn’t have that option yet, so I had to create a workaround for its workflow logic myself to access Claude’s built-in web search tools. You can just use the Claude model node directly. I even had to figure out a workaround for its memory on my own.

4

@tridi @ilker10 Seems like the Claude “Message a Model” node supports web search, but then doesn’t support “thinking”, and the opposite vice versa… This is, a pain. :frowning: