Claude recommends a business in one of two ways. From memory, it answers with what the model learned in training. With web search, which it runs when a question depends on facts that are "current, changing, or outside its training data", it searches, reads the results and names a short list with citations.
To be in the search version: let Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User reach your site, publish a page that answers the exact question with real facts, and be listed on the directories and "best of" pages Claude reads in your industry. In our study of 500 buyer questions, Claude cited 4,634 sources, 9.3 per answer, and the business's own website was the biggest single input.
When does Claude search, and when does it answer from memory?
Anthropic's developer documentation spells this out. Claude searches when a request depends on recent events, current prices, or "information about specific organizations, people, or products that might have changed". It answers without searching for stable knowledge, such as maths, coding concepts or creative writing. A question like "who is a good divorce lawyer in Austin?" or "best dental clinic in Sharjah?" is about specific organisations, so it usually leads to a search.
In the Claude apps, web search has been available on all plans worldwide since 27 May 2025. Anthropic's help center says that in the newer Claude app "there's no web search toggle. Claude searches the web when it helps." Paid users also have Research, where Claude "runs multiple searches that build on each other" before it answers.
From memory
- Built from what the model learned in training.
- ClaudeBot is the crawler that collects content that "could potentially contribute" to training.
- No links, so the buyer cannot check where a name came from.
- Changes only when a new model is trained.
With web search
- Claude writes its own search queries and can search several times in one answer.
- Every answer carries citations. In the API, each one quotes up to 150 characters of the page.
- Results include a "page_age" field, so Claude sees when a page was last updated.
- In our work, this is the part a business can change within weeks.
How big is the gap between the two? We could not measure Claude's memory in our study, but we measured Google's Gemini from memory against Claude with live search on the same 500 questions. Only 20.3% of the names Gemini gave from memory showed up anywhere in Claude's live answers for the same industry. Memory leans on a few old, famous names. Search answers each question from whatever pages fit it.
Which search engine does Claude use?
Not one engine you can log in to. Anthropic's subprocessor list does not name Google or Microsoft for web search. It names three companies under "Web Search": Brave Search, TurboPuffer and Parallel Web Systems. Anthropic also runs Claude-SearchBot, which it says "navigates the web to improve search result quality for users". So Claude's results come from a different mix of sources than Google's or Bing's, and a page that ranks well on Google can still be missing in Claude.
Three practical points follow:
- Check Brave. Search your buyer questions on search.brave.com. If your key pages never show up there, that is a warning sign for Claude.
- Do not block Googlebot by accident. Brave's crawler does not use its own user agent name. Brave says that if a page "is not crawlable by Googlebot, then Brave Search's bot will not crawl it either." A robots.txt rule meant for Google can cut you off from Brave too.
- Do not judge Claude by your Google ranking. Test the questions in Claude itself, in a fresh chat, and save the sources it shows.
What does Claude actually cite? Our 4,634-source study
On 21 October 2026 we sent 500 real buyer questions (10 industries, 25 in English and 25 in Arabic each, all about UAE businesses) to Claude through Anthropic's web search tool, once each, word for word, and saved every link it cited. Here is what kind of sites they were:
| Type of site | All 4,634 citations | English answers | Arabic answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Businesses' own sites and other sites | 79.4% | 79.1% | 79.6% |
| Directories and listings | 9.5% | 11.7% | 7.3% |
| Wikipedia | 5.8% | 3.8% | 8.0% |
| Review platforms | 2.9% | 3.3% | 2.5% |
| Social media and forums | 1.3% | 1.0% | 1.5% |
| News and media | 0.9% | 1.1% | 0.8% |
| Government | 0.2% | 0.0% | 0.3% |
What this tells a business owner in any country:
- There is no single site to be on. The 4,634 citations came from 1,954 websites, and 1,283 of them were cited once and never again. The ten most-cited sites made up only 18.1% of all citations. Claude builds each answer from the few pages that fit that exact question.
- Big directories matter in some industries, not all. Review platforms were 2.9% of citations overall but 23.3% for restaurants, nearly all TripAdvisor. Property portals' area guides turned up for schools, gyms and restaurants: 176 of Bayut's and Property Finder's 241 citations were for questions that had nothing to do with property.
- Wikipedia is loud but not useful. It was the most-cited single site (267 citations from English Wikipedia), yet only 7% of its citations were for an article whose title appeared anywhere in the answer. Our reading: the search attaches loosely matching articles, and the answer is written from the other sources.
- Official sites are almost absent. Only 5 of 4,634 citations came from UAE government websites. If buyers ask about licences or rules in your field, a clear page on your own site fills a gap Claude has.
The full breakdown, with the most-cited sites in each industry, is in our report on which websites AI cites.
How often does Claude cite the business it recommends?
More often than most people expect. For each business named in an English answer, we looked for its own website among the sources of that same answer. For at least 36% of them (419 of 1,160), it was there. That is a lower bound, because our matching only catches a name that also appears in the web address.
| Industry | Own website among that answer's sources |
|---|---|
| Home services | 70% |
| Automotive | 58% |
| Law firms | 44% |
| Dental clinics | 42% |
| Aesthetics and dermatology | 38% |
| Business setup | 34% |
| Education and childcare | 33% |
| Fitness and wellness | 25% |
| Real estate | 23% |
| Restaurants and cafes | 5.5% |
For a plumber, a garage or a law firm, your own page is the main road into Claude's answer. For a restaurant it barely matters: those answers came from TripAdvisor, city guides and lists. Know which kind of business you are before you decide where to spend effort.
Which dental clinic in Dubai has female dentists?
"Based on the search results, here are several dental clinics in Dubai that have female dentists:" The answer then listed Michael's Dental Clinic, Dr Aimen Zia Dental Clinic, Dr Joy Dental Clinic, Versailles Dental Clinic and American MD Center.
Why "best" and "top" pages get read so much
37.7% of all citations had "best", "top", "leading", "ranked" or "أفضل" in the title or address: 43.0% in English answers. 430 of the 500 answers cited at least one such page. In restaurants the share was 65.1%.
Many of those lists come from inside the category. At least 151 of the 1,747 list-style citations were on the website of a business the same answer then named. Many more were a clinic's own service page titled "Best Dental Clinic in Dubai". When a buyer asks for the best X in an area, a page that matches those words gets read. That is a fact about how Claude retrieves pages, not advice to call yourself the best: a buyer who opens the source can see who wrote it.
The honest version works just as well. Write a page whose title and first paragraph match the question ("Female dentists in Dubai Marina: who we have and when they work"), and get listed on the real directories and guides in your field.
Claude's three crawlers and your robots.txt
| Bot | What Anthropic says it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | Collects web content that "could potentially contribute to their training" | Your future content should be left out of training. It does not remove you from search |
| Claude-SearchBot | "Navigates the web to improve search result quality for users" | Stops your content being indexed for search, which "may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy" |
| Claude-User | Fetches pages when a person asks Claude a question | Claude cannot retrieve your page for that user, which "may reduce your site's visibility" |
Anthropic says its bots honour robots.txt and support the non-standard Crawl-delay rule. It also warns that blocking its IP addresses "may not work correctly", because that stops it from reading your robots.txt. If you want out of training but in search, the file looks like this:
User-agent: ClaudeBotDisallow: /User-agent: Claude-SearchBotAllow: /User-agent: Claude-UserAllow: /
Then check the firewall. Since 1 July 2025, Cloudflare has asked every new domain whether to allow AI crawlers, and a firewall block wins over the file. Your server logs show whether Claude-SearchBot is actually getting through. Our AI crawler list covers every major bot and a robots.txt for businesses that want to be recommended.
Arabic, other languages and location
Claude answers in the language of the question and reads pages in that language. In our study it replied in Arabic to 96.8% of the Arabic questions, and 90.2% of the sources in those answers were Arabic pages, and big English directories were almost never cited. A business with real pages in its buyers' language is reading material Claude can use. Without them, the answer is built from other people's pages.
Location is weaker than on Google. The developer tool lets an app pass an approximate user location (city, region, country or time zone) to localise results, but an app does not have to. In our study, which ran on a US-based index, at least 11 of 250 Arabic answers described businesses in Saudi Arabia instead of the UAE, mostly when an area name also exists there. Write your city and area in full on every page, in every language you publish, so Claude cannot mistake where you are.
How Claude differs from ChatGPT and Gemini
- Different index. ChatGPT sends its searches to outside search providers, and Google's AI uses Google's own index. Claude uses the providers above. In our study, Claude with live search and Gemini from memory named even one business in common on only 16.4% of the 421 questions where both named someone.
- No ads. On 4 February 2026 Anthropic said "Claude will remain ad-free" and that its responses will not be "influenced by advertisers". There is nothing to buy.
- Smaller audience, different use. In September 2026 Claude sent 0.95% of AI chatbot referral traffic worldwide and 1.81% in the US, against 80.48% and 75.17% for ChatGPT (Statcounter). Anthropic describes many of its conversations as "complex software engineering tasks, deep work, or thinking through difficult problems", so Claude matters most where buyers research before they buy: business services, software and professional firms.
- Claude is inside other products. The same web search tool is offered to developers on Anthropic's API, Claude Platform on AWS and Microsoft Foundry, so apps built on Claude can cite your pages too.
Checklist: getting recommended by Claude
- Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User in robots.txt. Decide on ClaudeBot (training) on purpose.
- Check that your firewall or CDN does not block them, and look for them in your server logs.
- Make sure Googlebot is not blocked anywhere, since Brave follows Googlebot's rules.
- Ask Claude your top 10 buyer questions in fresh chats, in each language you sell in. Save the answer and every source.
- For each question you lose, open the cited pages. Those are the sites you need to be on, or the pages you need to beat.
- Write one page per real question, with the price, area, hours, who it is for and who it is not for, in plain text.
- Put the question's words in the page title and first paragraph, honestly.
- Keep the page current. Claude sees when a page was last updated.
- Get listed on the directories, guides and lists Claude cites in your industry, with the same facts as your site.
- Explain the rules and licences of your field on your own site, with the regulator's name and a link.
- Publish real pages in your buyers' languages, with the city and area written out.
- Track visits with source claude.ai and ask every lead how they found you.
What we'd do for you
We start with a free AI check: 10 of your buyers' real questions, with the businesses AI names instead of you. The AI visibility audit (AED 1,950 in the UAE, USD 549 elsewhere at adjoltz.com/us) asks 30 buyer questions per language on four AI tools, saves every source they cite and lists the sites AI trusts in your industry, next to three named competitors. Monthly plans (Foundation AED 4,500 or USD 1,249, Growth AED 8,500 or USD 2,349, Authority AED 16,000 or USD 4,399) track your questions on ChatGPT and Gemini (Google AI), which carry most AI referral traffic, and the work behind them (pages, listings, crawler access, consistent facts) is the same work that gets you into Claude's sources. Plans run month to month, with no lock-in and no setup fee, and come with an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee (rules at /guarantee). We work with businesses worldwide in USD and with UAE and GCC businesses in AED.
What we don't promise
- That Claude will name you first, or every time. Answers change between runs and between models.
- Any control over what Claude learned in training. That only changes when a new model is trained.
- That our study applies unchanged to your market. It was one run of 500 UAE questions on one day, 21 October 2026, and sources change.
- Fake lists, bought placements or anything that would embarrass you when a buyer opens the source.