Anyone checking their AI visibility almost always opens ChatGPT, sometimes Perplexity, and that's where it stops. Claude is rarely included, even though it's being used more and more, including for business. A blind spot, then, and one that's easy to close.

01 / the two routesHow Claude arrives at its answers

Claude answers questions via two routes. The first is the training data: what the model picked up about your market and your business during its training. You have no influence over that in the short term; that knowledge is fixed until a next model version.

The second route is web search. If that's switched on, Claude searches the web live, and that search as far as is known runs via Brave Search. That detail is decisive for your visibility: it's not your position in Google that counts here, but whether your site is in the Brave index and gets found there. A site aimed entirely at Google can be invisible in Brave without anyone ever noticing.

The distinction between those routes also explains why answers can differ so much. Without web search, Claude describes a market the way it looked during the training period, and small or young businesses simply don't feature in it. With web search, current visibility counts, and that's something you can actually do something about.

02 / the testHow to check it yourself

The test takes ten minutes and involves five steps.

1. Formulate five questions your target client would actually ask, without your business name in them.
2. Put them to Claude with web search on and note for each question whether you're mentioned, and who is mentioned.
3. Ask the same questions again without web search: that's the training-data route from the previous section, and it gives different answers.
4. Check the Brave side: search on search.brave.com with site:yourdomain.nl and see what's indexed of your site.
5. Repeat the whole thing at a fixed point each month, with the same questions.

Individual measurements say little, because answers differ per session; the setup for a repeatable measurement is in how to check whether your business shows up in ChatGPT.

03 / accessClaudeBot needs to be let in

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, uses crawlers named ClaudeBot and anthropic-ai. If your robots.txt blocks those names, you're closing the door: Claude can't then fetch your pages and therefore can't cite them either.

Anyone testing only on ChatGPT is measuring one counter and calling it the market.

The check is simple: open yourdomain.nl/robots.txt and look for those two names under a Disallow rule. That block is sometimes there deliberately, as a choice against AI training, and sometimes by accident, coming along with a plugin or a default setting. Both are fine to respect, as long as it's a choice. The full breakdown per bot name is in allowing or blocking AI crawlers.

04 / the blind spotWhy Claude gets forgotten

Attention goes to ChatGPT because it's the biggest name, and to Google because that's where the measurable traffic comes from. Claude sits in between: widely used, little measured. It's also being used more and more in business settings, and the questions asked there ("which party can help us with this") are exactly the questions you want to be mentioned in.

On top of that, the Brave route has its own index. Work you do for Google doesn't automatically count there. Anyone who measures their visibility seriously therefore includes Claude as a separate measurement point alongside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, using the same fixed questions.

We speak from our own experience here: Claude is the platform on which we ourselves had the least visibility, precisely because we never tested on it. The platforms that are easiest to check get checked the most, and that says nothing about where your customers actually ask their questions.

05 / the limitWhen this isn't your priority

If you serve an audience that doesn't work with AI assistants, this measurement point is peripheral information for you. And if the basics of your site aren't in place yet (indexable, fast, with pages that genuinely answer customer questions), that work comes first. Claude cites what's readable and findable; without that basis there's nothing to cite, on any platform.

For everyone in between, the advice is small and concrete: include Claude as a fixed column in your monthly measurement, and treat the Brave index as a second front door that you check once and then keep up to date.

This text was produced with AI assistance and checked and approved by a human before publication.