Claude often answers without searching at all. When it does search, Anthropic documents citations as always on. Both halves of that matter to a brand.
What this surface is
Claude is an assistant that can be given a web search capability. When it has one, it decides per request whether the question needs live information, runs searches if it does, and answers with the sources it used attached.
For a brand that means visibility on Claude has two separate paths: what the model already carries from training, and what a search step retrieves in the moment. They fail in different ways and are fixed by different work.
How it differs from a results page
There is no results page to rank on. The answer is prose, and sources sit against the passages they support rather than in a list of ten.
More importantly, the search may not happen. Anthropic documents Claude as answering established knowledge directly and searching for information that is current or changing — so a question about your category can be answered with no sources consulted at all.
What the vendor documents
Each line below is read from the linked document. Nothing in this section comes from our own testing or from a third-party estimate.
Anthropic documents three agents: ClaudeBot, which collects web content that could contribute to training; Claude-User, which fetches pages when a person asks Claude something; and Claude-SearchBot, which analyses content to improve the relevance and accuracy of search results.
Source: Anthropic — Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler? (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)In Anthropic's developer documentation for the web search tool, citations are always enabled for web search, and each cited passage carries the source URL, the page title and a short excerpt of the text that was cited.
Source: Anthropic — Web search tool (developer documentation) (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)The same documentation states that Claude searches when a request depends on information that is current, changing, or outside its training data, and answers directly when the request draws on stable knowledge.
Source: Anthropic — Web search tool (developer documentation) (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)
What is not documented
These are open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering them with a precise number is guessing.
- Anthropic documents when Claude tends to search. It does not publish how the retrieved results are ranked, or which of them a given sentence ends up citing.
- Whether a search runs at all depends on the question and on the instructions wrapped around it, so coverage here is partly a property of how a user asked — not only of your site.
- Consumer Claude and the developer API are configured differently. Our figures describe a consistent API path with search available, and we do not extrapolate them to every Claude product.
What GetCited.me measures here
We run your saved questions through Claude on a schedule with web search available, and record whether your brand was mentioned, which source URLs the answer cited, which competitors appeared, and the sentiment.
Because Claude will sometimes answer without searching, the split between being mentioned from training and being cited from the live web is particularly informative here: the first is a reputation signal, the second a page-level one.
Claude tracking is part of the Growth and Scale plans; Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so paid plans cannot be purchased right now and every account runs on Launch.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this surface
No account, no card — results in the browser.