In its initial responses, ChatGPT didn’t provide any links to products. But it easily supplied them when I asked, and while I didn’t click on every single one, none appeared to be hallucinations. Claude, on the other hand, apologized and said that it “cannot actually link to websites or products directly.” Anthropic hasn’t released a web search feature for Claude yet, but the company says it’s working on it.
That technically made Claude the least useful chatbot I tested for shopping. But it also means that Anthropic has so far avoided wading into the ethically murky territory of allowing its AI chatbots to scrape human-written product reviews from the web. Instead, Claude bases its product comparisons on its existing data set. Perplexity, on the other hand, says that thanks to Buy with Pro, people “no longer have to scroll through countless product reviews.”
When I…
