How to get recommended by Claude
Claude can search the web and cite sources back to the user. Anthropic runs three crawlers, and — as with ChatGPT — the ones that make you visible are not the training crawler. Here is how to be in the citable set.
Steps
- 1
Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User
Anthropic runs ClaudeBot (training), Claude-SearchBot (indexing for Claude's search) and Claude-User (user-triggered fetch). To be recommended you specifically want to allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, even if you block ClaudeBot for training. Each is controlled separately in robots.txt.
- 2
Know the cost of blocking
Anthropic states plainly that disabling Claude-SearchBot "may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results," and disabling Claude-User reduces "visibility for user-directed web search." In other words, blocking these means invisibility in Claude's answers. Anthropic also honors the Crawl-delay directive for rate-limiting.
- 3
Write in clear, self-contained sentences
Claude's Citations feature works at the sentence level — it chunks documents into sentences and cites the specific passages a claim derives from. Anthropic reports built-in citations raised recall accuracy by up to 15%. Content written as clear, standalone, attributable sentences is therefore easiest for Claude to cite verbatim.
- 4
Structure your offering clearly
Organize services, areas served and differentiators into clear, labelled sections with structured data. Clarity directly improves recommendation accuracy, since Claude generates a targeted query, retrieves results, analyzes them and answers with citations.
- 5
Centralize on an AI-ready, open listing
A single AI-ready listing (like Wispra's) keeps the above consistent and machine-readable in one openly published place Claude can retrieve and trust — and publishes it as open data so it can be cited freely.
Sources
- Does Anthropic crawl the web, and how to block the crawler — Anthropic (Claude Help Center)
- Introducing Citations on the Anthropic API — Anthropic
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024) — arXiv (Aggarwal et al.)