How to get your product mentioned by Claude

Claude can mention your product in three ways: from what it learned in training, from Anthropic's search index, or from a page it fetches live while answering someone. Each of those has its own Anthropic crawler (ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User), so to be cited you allow the two that feed live answers, serve your content as real HTML, and earn mentions on other sites for the training side.

That split is the most useful thing to understand. Many sites block "Claude" in robots.txt to keep their content out of training and accidentally block the crawlers that would have cited them.

How does Claude find information about a website?

Claude draws on its trained knowledge and, when web search is on, on pages it retrieves for the question. Anthropic runs three separate bots, and each one feeds a different part of that. The table maps them using Anthropic's own descriptions and its own words on what blocking each one costs.

The first row decides what Claude says with web search off. The second and third decide whether Claude can find, read and link your pages with web search on, which is where citations with links come from.

Does blocking ClaudeBot stop Claude from citing you?

No. Blocking ClaudeBot only keeps your future pages out of Anthropic's training datasets. Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User are separate user agents, and under the robots.txt standard a crawler obeys the group that names it, so a ClaudeBot disallow does not touch them. Only a group naming them, or a * group when they have none of their own, applies.

A robots.txt that opts out of training and keeps both citation paths open looks like this:

# Anthropic: training
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

# Anthropic: search index and user-requested fetches
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /account/

Three details trip people up. The private-path rules have to be repeated inside the Claude-SearchBot group, because a bot that matches a named group ignores your User-agent: * rules entirely. Anthropic asks you to set robots.txt "for every subdomain that you wish to opt out from," so docs.example.com needs its own file. And Anthropic warns that blocking by IP address "may not work correctly or persistently guarantee an opt-out," because it stops them reading your robots.txt; they publish their crawler addresses at claude.com/crawling/bots.json for verification instead.

The comparison of ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User goes through each group in detail, and the robots.txt guide for AI bots gives a complete file covering every operator.

How do you confirm Anthropic's crawlers can reach you?

Your server logs answer this faster than any tool. Search the access log for each user-agent token and check the status codes it received. A crawler that only ever gets 403 or a challenge page has never read your content, whatever robots.txt says, because a firewall answers before robots.txt is consulted.

1. Search the log for each token: grep -E "ClaudeBot|Claude-SearchBot|Claude-User" access.log.
2. Count the status codes per token. Mostly 200 is healthy. A run of 403, 429 or 503 points at bot protection or rate limiting.
3. Take a few of the IP addresses and check them against claude.com/crawling/bots.json. A request that claims to be ClaudeBot from an address outside that list is someone borrowing the name, and blocking it costs you nothing.
4. If no Anthropic token appears at all over several weeks, fetch your own robots.txt and read it as each bot would, group by group.

If the log shows challenges, the fix is in the firewall or CDN, not in robots.txt: add an allow or skip rule for the verified addresses, then watch the codes turn to 200. A firewall rule keyed on the user-agent string alone lets anyone who copies the string through, so match on the published addresses as well.

Can Claude read JavaScript-rendered pages?

Plan on no. Vercel's study of AI crawler traffic found that ClaudeBot fetches JavaScript files, 23.84% of its requests, but does not execute them, so content that only appears after JavaScript runs is not seen. Anthropic documents no rendering for Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User either, so treat the raw HTML as all any of them read.

A client-rendered app built with a default Vite and React setup serves <div id="root"></div> and a script tag. To an agent that does not run the script, that is an empty page, however complete it looks in a browser.

Test it in one command. Pick a sentence that appears on your page in a browser and search the raw HTML for it:

curl -s -A "Claude-User" https://yoursite.com/pricing | grep -c "per seat per month"

A count of 0 means the sentence is not in the HTML Claude receives. The fix is server-side rendering, static generation or prerendering the public routes, so the words arrive in the first response. Do AI crawlers render JavaScript? covers the fix per framework.

How does a young brand get into what Claude knows?

With web search off, Claude answers only from training data, and a product launched after that data was collected, or mentioned on few pages, is either missing or described vaguely. The way in is being written about by name on pages Anthropic's crawler reads: listings, reviews, comparisons, documentation and community threads that describe what you do.

Anthropic does not publish how it weights sources, so the practical approach is coverage and consistency. Work through these in order:

1. Write one plain sentence that says what the product is, who it is for and what it costs, and use it verbatim on your home page and every profile you control.
2. Get listed where your category is discussed: launch directories, category directories and review sites, each with that same description.
3. Publish documentation and a public changelog on your own domain, in server-rendered HTML, so the facts about your product exist in text.
4. Earn mentions in comparison articles and community threads by being useful there, never by planting posts.
5. Keep ClaudeBot allowed if you want this to count. A site that blocks training has chosen to be absent from this path, which is a legitimate choice with a known cost.

Mentions on other sites matter more than volume on your own, because a model that sees the same description of you from several independent sources has a consistent answer to give.

Why do Claude's answers differ with web search on and off?

With web search off, Claude answers from training data and gives no source links. With it on, Anthropic says the response includes "direct citations to sources" and "source links for further reading." The same question can therefore name different products, or none, depending on the toggle, so test both.

To switch it, Anthropic's help says to click the "+" button in the lower left corner of the chat window and select Web search. On Team and Enterprise plans an owner has to enable it in organization settings first.

Read the two results as two different diagnoses:

How do you track whether Claude mentions you?

Keep 15 to 20 real buyer questions, run each once a month in a fresh chat with web search off and again with it on, and log whether Claude names you, links you and describes you correctly. Record the competitors it names instead; they show where the mentions you lack already exist.

Do not judge Claude by referral traffic alone. Cloudflare's 2025 Radar review found Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratio of the major AI platforms, reaching as much as 500,000:1, so Claude reads far more than it sends back as clicks. A mention in an answer can matter to a buyer who never clicks. The guide to measuring AI visibility covers how to score mentions and citations over time.

See whether Claude names you for your category's questions

A monthly log covers a few questions. LaunchScaler's full audit samples once, for $19, one time: it puts 10 buyer questions for your category to 7 answer engines, Claude among them with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and reads all 70 answers to show which name you and which competitors they name instead. It unlocks on your report after the free scan, which checks the access side for Claude directly: whether robots.txt blocks Claude-SearchBot, whether a firewall challenges retrieval bots, whether the Claude-User agent gets a real page rather than a challenge or an empty shell, and whether your main content is in the raw HTML. Run the free scan first, then open the full audit.