Platform playbook · Claude
How to show up in
Claude.
Claude is the most selective of the major engines. Its web answers run on Brave's index, not Google's; it favors specialist and documentation-grade content over news and forums; and it protects itself from misinformation by staying quiet about brands it can't verify. So the risk on Claude isn't a wrong answer about you, it's no answer at all. Here's how to earn a place in the answers of the engine your most careful buyers trust.
Platform playbook · Last updated
For the marketer reaching the deep-research buyers who run their due diligence in Claude.
To show up in Claude, publish specialist, documentation-grade content that's precise and well-sourced, make sure you're visible in Brave Search (Claude's web backend, not Google's), and build enough credible, verifiable presence that Claude is willing to name you, because its default with an unfamiliar brand is to stay silent. Claude is built for careful research and synthesis, so it has the highest bar of any engine for what it will cite, and the highest cost for being under-documented. Resonate Labs measures and optimizes Claude as its own engine, because what earns a citation here is unlike anything else in AI.
Runs on Brave
Claude's web answers come from Brave's index, matching Brave's top results about 87% of the time. Your Google SEO doesn't carry over.
Strictest filter
It favors specialist and documentation content over news and community, with the highest quality bar of the major engines.
Omits, doesn't lie
Claude tends to stay silent about brands it can't verify, so the risk here is absence, not a wrong answer.
What Claude cites, and why
Claude has become a preferred tool for complex research and synthesis, and its citation behavior reflects a careful, skeptical temperament. It favors specialist, practitioner, and documentation-style content over mainstream news and community discussion, the sources a thorough expert would actually trust. Where Perplexity treats a confident forum post as firsthand testimony, Claude leans the other way, toward content that demonstrates expertise and shows its work.
It's also distinctive in where its answers come from. When Claude searches the web, it doesn't crawl the open web itself, it queries Brave's independent index, and its citations match Brave's top results about 87% of the time, a far tighter alignment than ChatGPT has with its own backend. That single fact reshapes the playbook: visibility in Brave Search, not Google, is what feeds Claude's web answers.
The result is the highest quality bar of any major engine. Claude is the hardest to earn a citation from, but the audience makes it worth the effort: it skews toward people doing deep, deliberate research, the kind that precedes a serious B2B decision.
First, let Claude read you (and Brave)
Showing up in Claude is two jobs: let Anthropic's crawlers reach you, and be visible in the index Claude actually searches. Anthropic runs three declared crawlers, each controllable separately in robots.txt.
| Crawler | What it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | Collects content that may train Anthropic's models | You're absent from what Claude learns about your category |
| Claude-User | Fetches a page live when a user's question requires it | Claude can't pull you in real time mid-answer |
| Claude-SearchBot | Indexes content to improve Claude's search results | You're weaker in the results Claude assembles answers from |
Allow all three and confirm no firewall rule blocks them. But there's a second, Claude-specific step the other engines don't require: because Claude's web search runs on Brave's index, you also need to be visible in Brave Search. Brave maintains its own independent index of the open web, so the move here is to make sure you're crawlable and present there, not just in Google. A brand that's strong on Google but thin in Brave can be well-optimized everywhere else and still miss Claude, the same way a misconfigured site stays invisible to AI even when it ranks.
What to publish to earn citations
Claude rewards the content a careful expert would cite, which raises the bar in three specific ways.
Write it to documentation standard. Specialist depth, precise language, and clear structure beat polished marketing copy here. Think reference material, technical explainers, and thorough guides, content that answers a hard question completely rather than gesturing at it. This is the engine where shallow content is most visibly passed over.
Show your sources. Because Claude is skeptical by design, content that cites its evidence and states concrete specifics earns more trust, and structured data, real statistics, and clear citations measurably lift how often generative engines pull a page in. Unsupported claims are exactly what Claude's filter is built to screen out.
Be verifiable, not just present. Claude has to be able to confirm what you say about yourself, so consistent, accurate, well-documented information across your own site and the specialist sources it trusts is what lets it engage with you at all. This is the same extractable, well-structured content that travels across engines, held to Claude's higher standard of proof.
The Claude risk is omission, not misinformation
Every engine carries a brand-narrative risk, but Claude's is the opposite of Perplexity's. In a controlled test that planted fabrications about an unfamiliar brand, Claude avoided repeating the lies, but largely by disengaging, declining to discuss the brand or expressing skepticism, rather than by verifying the truth. It's real protection against a planted narrative. It's also a double-edged one: the same caution that refuses a fabrication will refuse a legitimate brand it simply can't confirm.
So on Claude, the failure mode to worry about isn't a competitor's false claim getting repeated, it's your own brand going unmentioned because there isn't enough credible, verifiable evidence for Claude to stand on. That makes the defensive job here distinctive: not monitoring for and correcting inaccuracies, the way you would on Perplexity, but building enough well-sourced, specialist presence that Claude is confident enough to name you in the first place. It's the most demanding form of defensive GEO, because the cure for silence is earning trust, not filing a correction.
Is Claude worth it for your buyers
Claude's audience is narrower than ChatGPT's broad base, so the honest answer depends on who you sell to. What its users share is a mode: deep, deliberate research, the careful evaluation that precedes a considered decision. For complex or technical products whose buyers do real due diligence before committing, that's exactly the audience that matters, and being absent from Claude means being absent at the decisive moment, even if the raw query volume is smaller than elsewhere.
The timing works in your favor once you've earned it. A new page tends to be picked up within a week or two across the assistants, so the effort is measurable within a cycle. The bar is higher than on any other engine, but so is the quality of the attention: a citation in Claude reaches someone who is reading closely and deciding carefully.
Where Resonate Labs fits
Claude rewards almost the opposite of what the others do, documentation-grade depth over ChatGPT's extractable reference, Perplexity's community, or Google's search index, which is the whole reason you can't treat AI as one channel: only about a tenth of citations overlap across the major engines. The full picture is laid out across platform divergence, with the sharpest contrasts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI.
For Claude specifically, Resonate Labs runs the work this page describes: confirming the crawlers can reach you and that you're visible in Brave, building the specialist, well-sourced content Claude's filter respects, and earning enough verifiable presence to move you from omitted to named. A free GEO Snapshot shows how Claude describes your company today, whether it cites you, names a competitor, or stays silent.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get my brand cited in Claude?
Publish specialist, documentation-grade content that's precise and well-sourced, because Claude has the strictest quality filter of the major engines. Make sure you're indexed in Brave Search, since Claude's web answers run on Brave's index, not Google's. Allow Claude's crawlers. And build enough verifiable, credible presence that Claude is willing to discuss you, because its default with an unfamiliar brand is silence.
Why won't Claude mention my brand at all?
Claude protects itself from misinformation by disengaging: when it can't verify a brand, it tends to decline to discuss it rather than risk repeating something wrong. That's real protection against planted narratives, but it has a cost, a legitimate but under-documented brand can simply go unmentioned. On Claude, the fix for being absent isn't correcting a lie; it's building enough credible, specific, well-sourced presence that Claude is confident enough to name you.
How does Claude's web search work, and what does Brave have to do with it?
When Claude needs current information, it queries Brave Search rather than crawling the web itself, and its citations match Brave's top results roughly 87% of the time, a much tighter alignment than ChatGPT has with its backend. The practical consequence: to show up in Claude's web answers, you need to be visible in Brave Search, so being indexed there matters for Claude in a way it doesn't for the other engines.
What kind of content does Claude favor?
Specialist, practitioner, and documentation-style content over mainstream news and community discussion. Claude is used heavily for complex research and synthesis, so it rewards depth, precision, and clear sourcing, the kind of content a careful expert would trust. Thin marketing copy and unsupported claims don't clear its bar.
Does my Google SEO help me in Claude?
Less directly than you'd expect. Claude's web answers run on Brave's independent index, not Google's, so strong Google rankings don't carry over the way they do on Google's own AI surfaces. General crawlability and content quality help you everywhere, but for Claude specifically the question is whether you're visible in Brave Search.
Is Claude worth optimizing for in B2B?
It depends on your buyers. Claude's audience is narrower than ChatGPT's but skews toward people doing deep, careful research, the kind of due diligence that precedes a serious B2B decision, especially for complex or technical products. If your buyers evaluate thoroughly before they commit, being absent from Claude means being absent at exactly the wrong moment, even if the raw volume is smaller.
Next step
See how Claude describes you.
A free GEO Snapshot maps your category across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and shows where you're named, where a competitor is, and where you're absent, engine by engine.
- Whether Claude cites you, names a competitor, or stays silent
- Which queries your competitors are winning that you're not
- What the first 30 days would move