How do you get cited by Claude?

Claude’s choice of sources differs from other assistants. In a study of 379,321 citations across 16,406 domains for SaaS and technology questions, 64% pointed to brand and company websites, 0.9% to social media and none to Reddit. That makes a company’s own pages particularly relevant in this dataset. Before improving those pages, check whether Claude can reach them.

Anthropic runs three separate bots, each with its own user-agent and purpose. Website owners can set a different access policy for each.

ClaudeBot — collects web content to improve generative AI models (training). Cost of blocking: future content signalled for exclusion from training datasets.

Claude-SearchBot — indexes content to improve search result quality. Cost of blocking: not indexed for search — “may reduce your site’s visibility.”

Claude-User — fetches pages when a Claude user’s question requires it. Cost of blocking: can’t be fetched on a user’s request.

All three respect robots.txt. Anthropic states its bots follow standard robots.txt directives, and they also honor the non-standard Crawl-delay. That’s a real difference from Perplexity, whose user-initiated fetcher generally ignores robots.txt. With Claude, a disallow means what it says — for all three bots.

Which is what makes the useful move possible: blocking training is not the same as disappearing from Claude. If your objection is to model training rather than to visibility, disallow ClaudeBot and keep the other two open. Citations flow through search and user-initiated fetches, not through the training corpus.

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /

In audits we see the opposite far more often: a blanket Disallow written to opt out of training, quietly costing every citation along with it.

To verify a crawler claiming to be Anthropic’s, check its IP against the list at claude.com/crawling/bots.json. The list covers crawler addresses together, rather than separating them by bot. Once the IP is verified, read the user-agent to identify the bot.

Claude-SearchBot indexes your pages for a search index. Which index is the more interesting question.

When a question needs current information, Claude runs a search and processes the results. Per Anthropic’s documentation, “every response includes citations, so you can easily verify sources yourself.” But the product documentation never names a web-search provider. What is on record: Brave Search was added to Anthropic’s public subprocessor list in March 2025; the definition of Claude’s web_search tool contains a parameter named BraveSearchParams; and in a documented test, the ten citations Claude returned matched a Brave search for the same terms exactly. Anthropic’s help center separately notes that image results are “powered by Bing.”

The instruction is the same either way: search Brave for the queries you want to win and see whether you appear. It takes a minute, costs nothing, and it’s a closer proxy for Claude’s retrieval than your Google rankings.

Before acting on advice about Claude, distinguish official documentation, research findings and unverified claims.

Both datasets show the same second-order pattern, and it matters more than any single tactic: Claude’s citations concentrate. Five hundred domains out of 16,406 take 59.9% of citations in SaaS and tech. Ten organizations take 57.8% in health. Claude isn’t spreading citations across the long tail — it returns to the sources it treats as reference-grade. Joining that set is a question of what your pages are, not how they’re formatted, and that is the actual game.

Start with the answer, keep each paragraph focused, use tables for comparisons and attribute specific claims to their sources. For Claude, the available citation data particularly favors material that works as a reference.

In the SaaS and tech dataset, 64% of citations landed on company-owned domains. Your product docs, technical specifications, methodology pages and comparison tables are therefore your strongest citation assets — and they usually read like sales copy when they should read like documentation. Concretely: