How to get recommended by Claude
Claude is the most conservative of the four engines about naming businesses. That makes it harder to win and more valuable when you do. What actually moves it.
Claude is the engine people skip, usually on audience-size grounds. That reasoning is backwards for anyone selling to developers, technical buyers or professional-services firms — and it ignores the more interesting fact, which is that Claude is measurably harder to get named by.
Why Claude names fewer businesses
Ask the same commercial question of all four engines and Claude will more often answer with criteria rather than companies: here is how to evaluate options, here is what matters, here are the trade-offs. It recommends specific businesses when it has a reason to be confident, and hedges when it doesn't.
That is a higher bar, and it has a direct consequence: the tactics that work on more permissive engines — publishing volume, keyword coverage, self-declared superlatives — move Claude least. What moves it is being unambiguously identifiable and independently corroborated.
Let the right crawler in
Anthropic runs several agents, and as with OpenAI they do different jobs. Blocking the training crawler while wanting to appear in Claude's search results is the same mistake people make with GPTBot.
| User agent | What it does | Blocking it means |
|---|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | Crawls for model training | Less likely to be known by default |
| Claude-SearchBot | Indexes for Claude's web search | Removed from search-backed answers |
| Claude-User | Fetches a page a user asked about | Users can't pull your page into a conversation |
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /What actually moves it
- 1
Be unambiguous about what you are
Claude is unusually sensitive to category clarity. A homepage that says what the company is, who it serves, and where — in plain nouns, in the first hundred words — does more here than anywhere else.
- 2
Be specific about scope
“For teams of 5–50”, “Magento to Shopify Plus migrations”, “US and Canada”. Stated limits make a recommendation safe to give, and Claude weights safety heavily.
- 3
Get corroborated off your own domain
One domain asserting something is a claim. Several independent sources agreeing is a fact. This is the single biggest lever on Claude, and the slowest.
- 4
Say what you're not good at
Counter-intuitive and genuinely effective. Content that states where a product is the wrong choice reads as reliable rather than promotional — and reliability is the thing being assessed.
- 5
Keep claims checkable
Numbers, dates, named integrations, real constraints. Vague superlatives are the easiest thing for a cautious system to discount.
How to measure it
Same method as the other engines: a fixed set of buyer questions, asked signed out, scored monthly. Expect a lower mention rate than ChatGPT on the same set — that gap is the point, not a measurement error.
One Claude-specific signal worth recording: when it declines to name anyone and answers with criteria instead. That is not a loss so much as an unclaimed answer — and the criteria it lists are a free specification for the page that would win it.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I get my business recommended by Claude?
- Make the entity unambiguous — plain category, audience and scope on your homepage — allow ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot, and get described consistently on independent sites. Claude weights corroboration and specificity more heavily than volume.
- Does Claude browse the web?
- Yes, for questions that need current information, and it cites what it uses. It also draws on knowledge from training, which is why crawler access matters on both paths.
- What is ClaudeBot?
- Anthropic's crawler for gathering training data. Claude-SearchBot indexes for Claude's search, and Claude-User fetches a page a user asks about directly. They are separate and can be controlled independently.
- Is Claude worth optimizing for?
- If you sell to developers, technical buyers or professional-services firms, yes — the audience skews that way and competition for these answers is thinner. If you sell high-volume consumer goods, it should sit below the other three.
- Why does Claude refuse to recommend a specific company?
- It hedges when it lacks confidence, answering with evaluation criteria instead. That is usually a signal that no business in the category is clearly enough defined to name — which makes it an opening rather than a dead end.
Primary sources
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