AI SEO
Claude SEO: how Claude finds and cites websites, and how to be one of them
A guide to Claude SEO: Anthropic's crawlers, how Claude's web search chooses sources, and how to make your pages precise, trustworthy and easy for Claude to cite.
Key takeaways
- Anthropic runs separate crawlers: ClaudeBot (training), Claude-SearchBot (search) and Claude-User (pages a user asks for).
- Allow the search and user crawlers if you want to be cited, and choose a training policy that suits you.
- Claude favours precise, well-structured, well-sourced pages. Vague marketing copy is rarely quoted.
- Claude is popular with professionals and developers, so B2B, SaaS and technical brands benefit most.
Claude is widely used by professionals, developers, analysts and writers: people who research carefully before they buy or recommend something. When Claude searches the web to answer a question, it reads a few pages and cites them. This guide covers how to make your site one of those pages.
How Claude gets its information
Like other assistants, Claude answers from two places: what its model learned during training, and what it finds with web search when search is enabled. For questions about current products, pricing, tools or local services, web search is where you can make a difference.
Anthropic's crawlers
| Crawler | Purpose | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | Collects public web data that may be used for training | Your content is excluded from future training |
| Claude-SearchBot | Indexes content to improve search results in Claude | Your pages may be less likely to appear in Claude's search answers |
| Claude-User | Fetches pages when a Claude user asks it to | Claude can't open your page for users who ask |
You control each one separately in robots.txt. A common setup for brands that want visibility: allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, and decide on ClaudeBot based on how you feel about training. Also check your CDN's bot settings, since some "block AI bots" toggles block all three.
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /What Claude likes to cite
From testing Claude across client prompts, the pages it cites tend to share a few traits:
- Precision. Specific numbers, definitions, version names and dates.
- Clear structure. Descriptive headings, short sections, tables for comparisons.
- Visible sources. Claims backed by data, documentation or named experts.
- Neutral tone. Explanatory content gets quoted more than sales copy.
- Freshness where it matters. Current pricing, features and dates for anything that changes.
Claude SEO for SaaS and B2B
Claude is a common research tool for software buyers and developers, so SaaS companies should pay special attention to:
- Documentation. Public, well-structured docs that explain what your product does and how.
- Pricing pages in text. Plans, limits and prices as text, not only in images or behind a toggle.
- Honest comparison pages. "You vs competitor" pages that are fair enough to be trusted.
- Integration pages. One page per integration, describing what it does.
Vague
- "Powerful automation that saves you time."
- "Flexible pricing for every team."
- "Integrates with your favourite tools."
Precise
- "Automations run on a trigger (new form entry, new order) and can update 12 apps."
- "Starter: $12 per user per month, up to 10 users. Pro: $24, unlimited."
- "Native integrations: Slack, HubSpot, Shopify, Google Sheets. Others via Zapier."
The product details above are an illustrative example.
Entity consistency
Claude, like any language model, gets confused when your company is described differently in different places. Make your name, product names, founding details, locations and key facts consistent across your site, LinkedIn, directories, Crunchbase-style profiles and press coverage. This is the core of LLM SEO.
A Claude-ready page checklist
- One clear definition of what the product or service is, in the first paragraph
- Specific numbers: prices, limits, dates, sizes
- A short comparison table against the main alternatives
- Sources for any statistics you quote
- Author or company details visible on the page
- No key information hidden in tabs, images or PDFs only
Measuring Claude visibility
Run your buyer prompts in Claude with web search enabled each month and record whether you're mentioned and cited. Check analytics for referrals from claude.ai. Compare results with ChatGPT and Perplexity: if you're cited in one but not another, the difference usually points to crawler access or index coverage.