A while back I wrote Is SEO Not Enough? Meet AEO — Getting Your Site Found by AI Search, and right after finishing it a question hit me: when AI does a web search, how much of my blog does it actually grab? The whole article verbatim? The first 500 characters? Or does it bail after seeing just the title? So I dug into it, and this post walks through Anthropic's official web_search and web_fetch tool specs, runs a quick test against my own blog, and ends with what all this concretely means for how you should write posts and copy.
"Search" and "fetch" are two different things
Before going further, the one thing worth being crystal clear on: when AI runs a query, "search" and "fetching the page body" are not the same operation. They're two separate stages.
Stage 1 (WebSearch): the AI takes your question and calls the WebSearch tool (which hits a search engine). What comes back is a list of search results — each entry has things like URL and title, but no page body.
Stage 2 (WebFetch): after looking at the search result list, the AI decides which entries are worth digging into, then fires a WebFetch request at each of those URLs, basically saying "give me the body of this page." That's when actual content gets pulled in.
