How to Get Your Business Cited by Claude

A hypothetical example. The head of procurement at a mid-sized distributor needs a partner to connect a warehouse management system to SAP. She does not scroll through search results. She opens Claude and types: "Find integration partners with logistics experience, an English-speaking team and fixed-price projects." Claude runs a web search, reads dozens of pages and, half a minute later, returns a short list with explanations and links. The list has three to five names. As far as this buyer is concerned, no other company exists, even one with a better website and lower prices. Claude SEO means making sure your business is on that list.

Claude is the AI assistant built by Anthropic. It is especially popular with developers, analysts and business professionals, which makes it a quiet but very valuable channel for B2B, tech and professional services. This guide covers how Claude builds its answers, which Anthropic crawlers visit your website and what you can do to get your business cited in Claude AI search instead of your competitors.

What a Claude answer looks like

An AI answer is not a list of links. It is text written for one specific question, with company names, comparisons, advice and links to the websites the facts came from.

Claude works as a chat on claude.ai and in the desktop and mobile apps. A user asks a question in plain language and gets a detailed answer. When web search is turned on, Claude first finds fresh pages, reads them and only then responds. That is when source citations appear: next to a statement or in a list of sources, the user can see which website each fact came from. One click takes them to that site.

There is a less visible scenario too. Companies build Claude models into their own products through the API: internal knowledge bases, research tools for analysts, developer tools. The people using those tools may not even know Claude is doing the answering. But if the tool searches the web, it expects the same things from a source website.

Who uses Claude and why they are high-value buyers

Every AI assistant has its own audience. Claude is strongest wherever the work involves long documents, code and complex problems:

• Developers and engineering teams. Claude is used heavily for programming. It writes code and helps pick a library, a cloud service, a tool or a vendor. The "what should we use for this" question gets asked right inside the workflow.
• Professionals and subject-matter experts. Analysts, lawyers, consultants and marketers upload long documents to Claude and ask it to compare options or draft a market overview.
• B2B and enterprise users. Anthropic sells plans for teams and companies, and Claude models run inside enterprise software. In this setting an AI answer often becomes an internal memo or a vendor shortlist.
• International users. People use Claude in many countries. Most questions are asked in English, and many are asked in the languages of other major markets.

That tells you what invisibility costs. If Claude does not know your business, you are not losing one random visitor. You are losing your place in a decision where a contract is at stake. Buyers only compare the companies they were shown. If the answer names three competitors, nobody asks you for a proposal. And you never find out, because a conversation with an AI assistant does not show up in any analytics tool.

Where Claude fits in your AI search strategy

Claude should not be the only assistant you optimize for. If you sell mainly to local consumers, start with Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT and Gemini. If your buyers are engineers, analysts or procurement teams who research vendors in depth, move Claude near the top of the list. The groundwork is shared either way.

Where Claude gets its information

Like other AI assistants, Claude has two sources of knowledge.

Training data. The model is trained on a huge body of text collected up to a certain date. Whatever made it into that data, Claude "remembers" and can repeat without searching. But that knowledge only updates when a new model comes out, so you cannot change it quickly. If little has been written about your company, the model probably does not know it. If the coverage is old, the model may hold outdated facts.

Real-time web search. When search is on, Claude writes search queries, gets a list of pages, opens the most relevant ones and builds the answer from them. This is the main channel for AI search optimization. If your website is accessible, clear and confirmed by other sources, changes you make can show up in answers without waiting for a new model. We explain how AI picks its sources in detail in our guide to how AI assistants choose which businesses to recommend.

Anthropic does not publish every detail of Claude's search, and it can change. Instead of hunting for a secret factor, bet on what works everywhere: solid indexing, open crawler access and a visible presence in third-party sources.

Anthropic crawlers: ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User

Three Anthropic crawlers visit websites, and each has a different job. You can see their names in your server logs, and you can set access for each one separately in robots.txt.

• ClaudeBot collects publicly available pages that may be used to train models. It shapes what future versions of Claude "remember." Whether to allow it is a policy decision. Some companies do not want their content used for training, while others want the model to know more about them.
• Claude-SearchBot crawls websites so Claude can find them in search and show them in answers. Block it, and your site may drop out of search-based answers, which are exactly the answers you want to appear in.
• Claude-User fetches a page when a specific user's request needs it, for example when someone pastes a link and asks Claude to read it. Block it too, and Claude cannot read your website even when a prospect points it there directly.

For a commercial website, the usual setup looks like this: Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User are allowed, service areas such as the cart, customer accounts and internal search are closed to all crawlers, and the company decides for itself about ClaudeBot. Anthropic states that its crawlers respect robots.txt. Here is a simple example:

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /account/

User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /account/

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

The last group opts out of training. Remove it if you want future models to learn from your content. It is a business decision, not a ranking requirement. For how to set access for every major AI crawler, see our guide on which AI crawlers to allow on your website.

The hidden trap: firewalls, CDNs and bot protection

Allowing a crawler in robots.txt is not enough. A web application firewall, DDoS protection, a CDN's bot management or geo-blocking switched on "just in case" can stop it first. On paper robots.txt is open, but the crawler gets a 403 error or a challenge page, and the site owner has no idea. Only your server logs show it: check whether Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User show up and which status codes they get.

Claude vs ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

All three share the same basic mechanics: a source website has to be accessible, clear and confirmed by third-party sources. What differs is the audience, the source of fresh data and the crawlers, and that changes your priorities.

Good work for Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT covers much of the foundation for Claude. On top of it come fact-dense pages for expert questions, industry mentions and a check that Anthropic's crawlers actually reach your site.

How to get your business cited by Claude

Open your website to Anthropic's crawlers

Check robots.txt, your hosting and CDN security rules and your server logs. Make sure the main text of every page is in the HTML and does not load through a script after a click. AI crawlers often do not run complex JavaScript. Pages should return a 200 status code, with no redirect chains and no login wall.

Build pages that are easy to summarize

Claude answers professionals, and professionals ask specific questions. There is nothing to quote in "a personalized approach" or "a team of experts." Claude needs facts:

• what exactly you do and which industries you serve;
• technologies, standards, integrations and certifications;
• timelines, engagement models and what drives the price;
• the countries and languages you work in;
• who your experts are and what backs up their experience.

A structure that works well: a short answer at the top of the page, then the details, comparison tables and an FAQ section. Schema markup helps machines tell apart the company name, the service and the address.

Speak your buyer's language

If your customers are in other countries, your website needs a full version in their language. That means service pages, terms, FAQs and company details, not a machine-translated homepage. Link language versions with hreflang tags so crawlers know which page is for which market. Spell your company name exactly the same way everywhere. If your website says "Company N," a directory says "Company N-Data" and a social profile says "CompanyN Inc." (hypothetical names), an AI assistant may not realize they are the same company.

Grow mentions in respected third-party sources

Claude checks what a company says about itself against independent sources. For B2B, those include industry directories and vendor rankings, professional communities, trade media, expert articles by your team, interviews and conference talks. The more independent sources confirm the same facts, the more confidently an assistant names you. We cover this in more depth in our guide to AI search optimization for service and B2B companies.

Keep the whole website in good shape

AI evaluates the whole website, not one great article. Slow pages, broken links, last year's prices and pages that contradict each other all lower your chances of becoming a source. That is why technical fixes and keeping your data current are ongoing work, not a one-time project.

How to check what Claude says about your business

Asking "what do you know about company X" once will not tell you much. Answers depend on the wording, the language and whether search is on. You need to check regularly with the same set of questions.

• Do prompt research. Collect the questions buyers ask AI when they choose a vendor: "recommend," "compare," "which provider is best for this." For Claude, collect them in the languages of your target markets and turn them into tracked prompts.
• Ask with search on and off. This separates what Claude knows from training from what it finds on the web right now.
• Record the results: whether your company is named, who it is named alongside, which websites are cited as sources and whether the facts are correct.
• Check your server logs: are Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User visiting, and are they getting a 200 status code?
• Check Google Analytics 4 for referral traffic from claude.ai. There will not be much of it, since many people read the answer and never click. But every one of those visits comes from someone who is already choosing.
• Repeat the check on a schedule and compare it with previous results.

We check AI answers within each service's rules and put the Claude results in one report together with data from the other AI assistants.

The result: you make the shortlist

Once your website is open to Anthropic's crawlers, your pages answer professionals' questions and respected third-party sources write about you, Claude has what it needs to name you. Nobody can guarantee a specific position in an AI answer, because answers change with every new wording. But how AI picks its sources is now predictable enough that steady work on it pays off, just like it does in SEO. GEO is built on top of good old SEO.

And none of this work is for a single assistant. The same changes help in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. To see which assistants matter most for your market, read our guide on which AI assistants to prioritize.

How AI Search Optimization works with Claude

AI Search Optimization has been doing SEO since 2002. We have 100+ clients around the world and Google and Yandex certifications. We work with businesses in New York City and in other countries and optimize for every major AI assistant, from Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT to Claude and Perplexity. One team handles your website and your AI visibility end to end.

• AI visibility audit. We check what AI assistants say about you and your competitors, whether your website lets AI crawlers in and whether your company facts are clear to them.
• Prompt research. We collect the questions your customers ask AI assistants, the keyword research of AI search, in the languages you need.
• Technical fixes. AI crawler access, llms.txt, schema markup, language versions, site speed and error fixes.
• Content built for AI answers. Service pages, answers to customer questions, comparisons and expert articles.
• Brand mentions. We grow your presence in directories, rankings and professional communities.
• Articles in external sources. We write and publish articles that build the authority of your company and its experts.
• Ongoing AI visibility tracking. We check answers for your tracked prompts and show you what has changed.

AI evaluates the whole website, so we take care of the entire site from day one, from technical fixes to GEO. We guarantee delivery of GEO tasks, error fixes and fast adaptation of your website to changing AI search requirements, including when Anthropic changes its crawlers or answer formats.

The price is $290 per month, which includes the first 10 hours of work. Every additional hour is $45. GEO work is billed on a time-and-materials basis: we invoice only the work completed and delivered that month. No discounts or free months, just an honest price from day one.

Book a call. We will check whether Anthropic's crawlers can reach your website and show you which companies Claude recommends in your niche.