Get found by Claude
Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant, and its users skew toward professionals and enterprises: the people who research vendors, write the business case, and sign off on the purchase.
What the data says
How people use Claude to search in 2026
Claude is used mostly for work. Anthropic's June 2026 Economic Index found that around 35% of Claude chat and Cowork conversations on weekdays are personal, rising to just under 50% at weekends. On weekdays the mix leans to business correspondence, marketing copy and slide decks. Computer and mathematical occupations make up roughly 30% of surveyed users, and management roles 23%, far above their share of the US workforce. Anthropic also reports that eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers and that more than 1,000 businesses spend over $1 million a year with it.
Web search has been available on all Claude plans worldwide since May 2025. Anthropic's own examples show how professionals use it: sales teams researching industry trends for account planning, financial analysts reviewing market data and earnings reports, and shoppers comparing product features and prices across sources. For B2B brands, Claude usually appears in the research and justification stage: a buyer asks it to scan the market, compare approaches, or draft the case for a purchase. Claude is also built into other tools, so it may be doing the research inside a company's existing software.
How Claude finds and cites sources
According to Anthropic's documentation, Claude decides when to search based on the request. It searches for recent events, current prices or statistics, and information about specific organizations, people or products that might have changed, and it answers from its own knowledge for stable facts. It writes a targeted query, reviews the results, can search several times within one answer, and returns a response with citations. On Anthropic's API, citations are always on for web search, and each one carries the source URL, page title, and up to 150 characters of the cited text. Search results also include the page's last-updated date.
Anthropic runs three web agents. Claude-SearchBot indexes content to improve search results, and Anthropic says disabling it may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results. Claude-User fetches pages when a person asks Claude about them, and blocking it prevents Claude from retrieving your content for those requests. ClaudeBot collects content that may be used for model training, and you can block it on its own. All three honor robots.txt. Anthropic does not publish ranking factors for which sources Claude cites, so treat any claim of a guaranteed placement with suspicion.
How to earn visibility on Claude
Allow the right Anthropic agents
Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User in robots.txt on every subdomain. If you want to opt out of training, block ClaudeBot on its own rather than blocking all Anthropic agents.
Lead with the citable fact
Claude's citations quote short passages. Open each section with a one- or two-sentence answer that holds up on its own, then add the detail and evidence underneath.
Publish the research Claude is asked to do
Professionals use Claude to compare approaches, build business cases and assess vendors. Publish clear pricing logic, comparison pages, implementation timelines and methodology pages that answer those questions directly.
Keep pages current and dated
Claude searches when information may have changed, and search results include when a page was last updated. Refresh key pages and show visible update dates on pages that carry numbers.
Earn credible third-party coverage
Claude draws on many sources for each answer. Trade publications, analyst write-ups, partner pages and expert commentary that describe what you do give Claude independent evidence to cite.
Test the real prompts
Run the questions your buyers ask through Claude with search on, record which sources it cites, and close the gaps between what it says and what is true about you.
It is not just about traffic
Claude's audience is small next to Google's, but it is concentrated among the people who research purchases and present them for approval. Being the source Claude cites when a manager asks it to compare vendors is a direct route into qualified pipeline. AlchemyLeads is a revenue-first AI search agency: we map the research questions your buyers bring to Claude, make sure Anthropic's search agents can reach your site, build pages that answer those questions with specific, citable facts, and tie AI-referred visits to leads and revenue. For one industrial ground-monitoring manufacturer, that approach produced 4,500 AI citations across 18 pages in six months and 170% more requests for quote.
Straight answers
Does Claude search the web?
Yes. Web search has been available on all Claude plans worldwide since May 2025. According to Anthropic, Claude searches when a question depends on current or changing information, such as recent news, prices, statistics, or details about specific companies and products, and it answers with citations that link back to the pages it used.
Which Anthropic crawler should we allow?
Anthropic runs three. Claude-SearchBot indexes pages to improve search results, Claude-User fetches pages when a person asks about them, and ClaudeBot collects content that may be used for training. Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User may reduce your visibility in Claude. You can block ClaudeBot alone if you want to opt out of training.
How many people use Claude?
Anthropic does not publish a user count for Claude. It does publish business metrics: run-rate revenue above $47 billion in May 2026, more than 1,000 customers each spending over $1 million a year as of April 2026, and eight of the Fortune 10 as customers. Third-party user estimates vary widely, so we do not cite them.
Why does Claude matter for B2B companies?
Claude's usage leans toward work. Anthropic's June 2026 Economic Index found management roles make up 23% of surveyed users against 7% of US employment, and most weekday conversations are not personal. Those are the people who research vendors and build the business case, so a citation in Claude reaches decision makers at a useful moment.
Can we pay to appear in Claude's answers?
No. Claude does not offer paid placement in its answers. Being cited depends on Claude being able to reach your pages, those pages answering the question clearly and specifically, and other credible sources supporting what you say. Anthropic does not publish ranking factors, so no agency can promise that Claude will cite a particular page.
Sources
- Anthropic: Series H announcement, May 2026
- Anthropic: Google and Broadcom compute partnership, Apr 2026
- Anthropic: Series G announcement, Feb 2026
- Anthropic Economic Index report: Cadences, Jun 2026
- Claude Help Center: Does Anthropic crawl data from the web?, Apr 2026
- Claude Platform Docs: Web search tool, Oct 2026
- Claude blog: Web search now available globally on all plans, May 2025
Show up where your buyers actually search
We map where your buyers research, then build the visibility that turns those moments into qualified pipeline.
