What is Claude?
Anthropic Claude
Claude is the AI assistant built by Anthropic. It answers from what its models learned in training, and it can also search the web and cite sources when a question needs current information. Anthropic added web search to Claude in March 2025.
Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant and one of the engines that can shape how buyers see your brand.
With web search on, Claude retrieves current pages and cites them; without it, Claude answers from training data.
Anthropic runs separate crawlers for training, search and user requests, which you control in robots.txt.
How Claude answers questions
Claude answers questions in two ways: from its training data, or by searching the web and grounding its answer in the pages it finds.
Training data: what the model learned before its knowledge cutoff. Answers about well-known brands often come from here, usually without citations.
Web search: when a question needs current or specific facts, Claude can search, read pages and cite them as sources.
Anthropic introduced web search in Claude in March 2025. Which features you see depends on your plan and settings, so two users can get differently sourced answers to the same question.
Claude is also available to developers through Anthropic's API and through cloud platforms, so the same models power answers in other products, not only in the Claude apps.
Why Claude matters for brand visibility
Claude matters for brand visibility because people use it for research, writing and analysis at work, which often includes comparing vendors. If a buyer asks Claude to shortlist tools for a task, the brands it names become the starting point for that decision.
Claude's answers can differ from ChatGPT's and Gemini's for the same prompt, because each engine uses different models, search sources and training data. A brand that ChatGPT recommends may be missing from Claude, and the reverse.
Be realistic about scale. Public estimates suggest Claude reaches fewer consumers than ChatGPT, so it should not be your only focus. It earns a place in your tracking because the audience is distinct, and because the work that helps you in Claude, clear content and strong third-party coverage, helps in other engines too.
Claude's crawlers and your robots.txt
Anthropic operates three crawlers, and each one affects your visibility in a different way:
ClaudeBot: collects content that may be used to train Anthropic's models.
Claude-SearchBot: crawls content to improve the quality of Claude's search results.
Claude-User: fetches pages when a user asks Claude a question that needs web access.
Blocking ClaudeBot opts your future content out of training. Blocking Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User can reduce how often your pages appear in Claude's search answers. Review your rules on purpose rather than copying a blanket block list. See robots.txt for AI for the wider picture.
How to improve how Claude describes your brand
You improve how Claude describes your brand by making accurate information easy to find, both on your site and across the web.
Check access: allow the Anthropic crawlers you want, and make sure key pages render without JavaScript.
State your facts clearly: what you do, who it is for, pricing model and how you compare, in plain language.
Earn third-party coverage: reviews, comparisons and industry media give Claude independent sources to cite.
Keep facts consistent: the same names, numbers and claims everywhere reduce the risk of AI hallucination.
Track Claude separately: run your prompts in Claude and compare results with other engines.
Remember that training-based answers change slowly. Improvements usually show up first in answers where Claude searches the web.
How KIME works with Claude
KIME tracks Claude as one of ten AI engines, by country and language, so you can see how Claude mentions and describes your brand next to ChatGPT, Gemini and others. The KIME MCP server also works the other way round: it connects Claude, and other MCP clients, to your KIME workspace. You can ask about your visibility, share of voice, sentiment and cited sources in chat, and manage prompts and tasks, with write actions flagged for your approval.
Frequently asked questions
Does Claude search the web?
Yes. Anthropic added web search to Claude in March 2025. When search is used, Claude retrieves current pages and cites them as sources in its answer. Availability depends on your plan and settings. When Claude does not search, it answers from its training data, which only covers information up to the model's knowledge cutoff.
Which crawlers does Anthropic use for Claude?
Anthropic uses three crawlers. ClaudeBot collects content that may be used for model training. Claude-SearchBot crawls content to improve Claude's search results. Claude-User fetches pages when a user asks Claude a question that needs web access. You can set robots.txt rules for each one separately. Check Anthropic's documentation for current details.
Can I use Claude to analyze my KIME data?
Yes. The KIME MCP server connects Claude to your KIME workspace through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard created by Anthropic. Once connected, you can ask Claude about your visibility, share of voice, sentiment and cited sources, and manage prompts and tasks. Write actions are flagged so Claude asks before anything changes.