Claude SEO: how to get your brand found, named and cited by Claude

What is Claude SEO, and when does Claude search the web?

Claude SEO covers two kinds of answer. In the first, Claude runs a web search, reads pages and links the sources it used. In the second, it answers from what it learned in training, with no links at all. Your work differs for each, so start by knowing which one your buyers' questions trigger.

Anthropic launched web search in Claude on 20 March 2025 with inline citations, and made it available on all plans globally from 27 May 2025. Anthropic's developer documentation for its web search tool says Claude searches when a request depends on information that is current or changing: recent news, current prices, and facts about specific organizations, people or products that might have changed. It answers directly, without searching, for stable knowledge and brainstorming.

So "best payroll software for a 50-person company" or "how much does X cost" invites a search, where crawlable, current pages win. "What is X" often does not, and your brand appears only if the web described you accurately before training. That second case is the territory of LLM SEO.

How does Claude choose which sources to cite?

Anthropic does not publish how Claude ranks sources, but three published details tell you what to build.

First, the index. TechCrunch reported on 21 March 2025 that Anthropic had added Brave Search to its subprocessor list, and that a search in Claude and in Brave returned identical citations. Anthropic did not confirm it, so treat Brave as the likely source, not a certainty. Either way, Claude's results do not come from your Google rankings, which is why a brand can lead Google and be missing from Claude.

Second, the citation itself. Anthropic's web search documentation says each citation carries the URL, the page title and up to 150 characters of cited text. A fact that fits in one clear sentence can be quoted; a claim spread across a long paragraph is harder to lift. Third, freshness: search results carry a page_age field showing when the page was last updated, so a visible, honest last-updated date gives Claude a reason to prefer your page for current questions.

Which robots.txt settings decide whether Claude can see you?

Three Anthropic user agents matter, and most accidental blocks come from treating them as one. Anthropic's crawler help page, updated 7 April 2026, describes ClaudeBot as collecting content that may contribute to training, Claude-SearchBot as crawling to improve search result quality, and Claude-User as fetching pages when a person asks Claude a question. All three follow robots.txt, and Anthropic supports the non-standard Crawl-delay rule if you need to slow them down.

The same page says disabling Claude-SearchBot prevents your content being indexed for search and may reduce your visibility in user search results, and disabling Claude-User may reduce visibility for user-directed web search. It also warns that blocking Anthropic's IP addresses may not work as expected, because it stops the bots reading your robots.txt at all.

Check your CDN too. Cloudflare changed its default in July 2025 to block AI crawlers unless they pay, and its managed robots.txt can disallow ClaudeBot with other training bots. Confirm the rule does not also catch Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User. Our technical AEO reviews check robots.txt, Cloudflare and server logs as part of wider AI crawler access work.

How do you get your pages into Brave Search?

If Claude's web results come from Brave, your pages must be in Brave's index before Claude can cite them. Brave's crawler help page explains three things most SEO teams never check.

Brave's crawler has no user agent of its own, and Brave says that if a page is not crawlable by Googlebot, its bot will not crawl it either. Your Googlebot rules are, in effect, your Brave rules. Brave also says robots.txt is not used to stop indexing; delisting needs a noindex directive, which Brave must re-fetch to see. Retired pricing pages blocked only in robots.txt can linger in Brave and in Claude's answers.

Brave offers a URL submission form at search.brave.com/submit-url for re-fetching. The test takes ten minutes: search Brave for your brand, your top product pages and your five most important buyer questions, note which of your URLs appear and whether snippets are current, then submit the missing or stale ones.

How do you get cited by Claude?

Once access and indexing are sound, Claude rewards the same things other engines do, with extra weight on short, quotable facts. Build the pages your buyers' prompts hit, write them so each key claim stands alone, and earn mentions on the sources Claude reads for your category.

Start with pricing, comparison, alternatives and how-to pages. Write answer-first content: a question heading, then a direct answer that fits the 150-character citation window, then the detail. Use tables for comparisons, name the source of every figure, and show a last-updated date. Comparison pages and alternatives pages are where vendor shortlists form, so they come first for B2B SaaS.

Then work off-site. Ahrefs found across 75,000 brands that web mentions correlate 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks. That study is about Google, but assistants generally repeat what credible third parties say. Digital PR built on original data, accurate review profiles and genuine press coverage feed the sources Claude cites. If Claude already describes you incorrectly, the fix is the same method aimed at the sources behind the wrong AI answers.

Is Claude worth optimizing for separately?

Usually as part of a wider program, rarely on its own. Claude is growing quickly but still sends a small share of traffic, so the case rests on who your buyers are, not on volume.

SE Ranking's study of 101,574 websites, published in June 2026, found Claude's share of total website traffic grew 386% between January and April 2026, from 0.0029% to 0.0141%. The growth is real; the base is tiny. Cloudflare's July 2025 figures also show Anthropic's crawlers fetched about 30,000 pages for every referral they sent, so Claude reads far more than it links. Visibility in Claude is more about being named in the answer than about clicks.

It earns dedicated effort when claude.ai referrals convert in GA4 or prospects mention Claude in sales calls. It does not earn a separate budget if your pages are not indexed in Google and Bing, or if ChatGPT SEO and Google AI Overviews work has not started. Those engines reach more buyers, and most of that work helps Claude too.

How do you measure Claude visibility?

Combine a fixed prompt set, referral data and server logs, because Anthropic offers nothing like Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance or Search Console's generative AI report. Take a baseline before changing anything.

Write 25 to 100 buyer prompts, run each in Claude with web search on, and log whether you are named, which URLs are cited and which competitors appear. Sample each prompt more than once, since answers vary. Run the same set in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot to compare citation share across engines, which is how our AI visibility tracking service reports it.

For traffic, Google Analytics added an AI Assistant channel on 14 May 2026, Search Engine Roundtable reported, which labels visits from assistants including Claude with the medium ai-assistant. It only counts from that date, so also keep a segment for the claude.ai referral source for older data. For access, filter server logs for Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User: rising Claude-User fetches on a page suggest it is being read for live answers, even when no one clicks.

What does a 90-day plan for Claude look like?

Fix access and indexing in the first month, rewrite and build in the second, and judge results on trends in the third. The plan below assumes Claude is one engine inside a wider AI search program.

• Days 1 to 15: baseline the prompt set in Claude and the other engines; check robots.txt, Cloudflare rules and server logs for all three Anthropic bots; run the Brave Search index check.
• Days 15 to 45: rewrite the five to ten pages your prompts hit most, answer-first, with one-sentence facts, tables, sources and last-updated dates; submit changed URLs to Brave and replace robots.txt blocks on retired pages with noindex or redirects.
• Days 30 to 75: close gaps in the third-party sources Claude cites for your prompts: review profiles, editorial best-of lists, industry publications and coverage of original data.
• Days 60 to 90: re-run the prompt set, compare mentions, citations and claude.ai referrals against the baseline, and reprioritize from what moved.

Should you hire a Claude SEO agency?

Hire help when no one on your team owns crawler access, Brave indexing and prompt tracking; keep it in-house when your SEO team already does that for other engines. A good partner shows its prompt set and measurement method in the first call.

Be wary of anyone promising positions in Claude, citing lifts without a baseline, or selling schema markup and llms.txt as the main lever; neither is a confirmed citation input for any major engine. No one can promise a citation. Claude work belongs inside a broader program, because the same pages and mentions serve Perplexity SEO, Copilot and Gemini.

As an AEO agency, AEO Services Agency, the AEO and GEO practice of Greenwolf Tech Labs, starts every engagement with a free AEO visibility check that includes Claude. Work is quoted at a fixed price, and we measure the same prompt set before and after changes so you can verify what moved. For market rates, see our guide to what AEO costs.