Unclear What decides whether the limit counts per turn or per session is not settled.
What
Claude Code limits how many web searches Claude can run, set by CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION. That limit used to be a fixed count for the whole session (one run of Claude Code) that never came back. It is now a budget that refills a set number of searches per hour.
When Claude hits the limit, the message it gets now says:
- whether the limit is per turn (one exchange with you) or per session
- whether it refills
- that it must not work around the limit by querying search engines with
curlorwget, or through third-party readers
Why
In a long session Claude can search again later instead of being cut off for good. It is also told plainly not to get around the cap by other means.
Names in the bundleCLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Confirmed since
Anthropic's documentation has since written up CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION, on Tools reference.
Set the [`CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION`](/docs/en/env-vars) environment variable to change the cap; it accepts a positive whole number, so the cap can be raised but not turned off. An interactive terminal session's limit refill…tools-reference see the edit
Something disagreesSomething we can check disagrees with this entry, or the writer said they could not settle it.
The writer flagged doubt
What decides whether the limit counts per turn or per session is not settled.
Anthropic's documentation agrees
Anthropic's documentation has since written up CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_WEB_SEARCHES_PER_SESSION, on Tools reference.