Claude Visibility Checker

Claude doesn't have a single "index" the way a search engine does. It can name your business in two quite different ways, and a visibility check is only meaningful if it looks at both.

• Training data (the default). Claude answers primarily from what it learned up to its knowledge cutoff. If your brand appeared clearly and often across the public web before that date, Claude can recall and recommend you with no live lookup at all. You can't edit this on demand - you can't email Anthropic to add yourself. You earn your place in it over time through a distinct, well-referenced footprint.
• Web search and tool use (the live path). In claude.ai, the Anthropic API and Claude Code, Claude has an optional capability to search the web, open pages and cite what it finds. When that is switched on, Claude can reach your current site and quote a passage back with a source link - even if it never saw you in training. This is the layer you can influence quickly, but only if your pages are reachable, readable and cleanly structured.

A brand can win on one and lose on the other. You might be recalled from training but never cited live because your current pages are unreadable, or absent from training yet pulled in live because your content answers the exact question. SearchScore reports where you stand on each, because the fixes are different.

Claude is one of the most heavily used models by developers, and a large share of its usage never touches the claude.ai chat window at all. It reaches people through the Anthropic API, embedded inside other companies' apps, assistants and internal tools, and through Claude Code on engineers' machines. That changes what "being visible in Claude" means.

Many of those products run their own retrieval - they search the web or their own content, then hand the results to Claude to answer from. So your business can be surfaced by Claude in a customer-support bot, a research tool or a coding assistant you've never heard of, entirely outside a normal chat. You can't optimise for each of those apps individually, and you don't need to. The same fundamentals decide all of them: pages Anthropic's crawlers can reach, content structured so a clear answer can be lifted out, and a strong, well-referenced footprint so you're the entity that gets named. Get those right and you show up wherever Claude is put to work.

Most "AI bot" advice treats Claude as if it reaches your site by magic. It doesn't - Anthropic operates named crawlers, and every one of them checks your robots.txt first. If you disallow them, you disappear from what Claude can learn from and retrieve:

• ClaudeBot - Anthropic's main web crawler, gathering public content. Allow it and you stay eligible to be learned from and found; block it and you take yourself out of the running.
• anthropic-ai - a user-agent associated with Anthropic's web data collection. Treat it the same way you treat ClaudeBot.
• Claude-Web - the agent tied to Claude fetching pages from the web. Block it and Claude can't open your link to read or quote you.

Because all of them obey robots.txt, a single blanket "block AI scrapers" rule can silence you across every Claude surface at once - while your team assumes the site is wide open. SearchScore checks each agent's access separately and tells you exactly which ones can reach you today.

You get a single score and a ranked fix list, so you know which change moves Claude visibility first. The same audit also covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews - but this page is built around what's true for Claude.

For ongoing monitoring, SearchScore's Tracker goes one step further: it puts real prompts to six live engines - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek - and counts exactly how often each one cites you, with a dedicated Claude column. We don't guess whether Claude names you; we ask it and count.

• Publish clear, structured content. Lead each page with a direct, answer-first passage, use real headings, and mark up who you are with Organisation, Person, Product and FAQ schema. Claude picks the source it can lift a clean, self-contained answer from - make that source you.
• Allow ClaudeBot in robots.txt. Confirm ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai and Claude-Web are not disallowed, and that no blanket "block AI bots" rule is quietly catching them. If Claude's crawlers can't fetch you, nothing else you do matters.
• Be authoritative and well-cited. Claude leans toward sources the wider web already trusts. Earn references from reputable pages, keep your name, category and details consistent everywhere they appear, and firm up the entity Claude attaches to you.
• Add an llms.txt. A plain-text file at /llms.txt points AI systems to your most important pages and states plainly what you do - a low-cost signal that helps Claude find the content worth quoting instead of guessing.

None of these is a growth hack; they're the durable foundations. Run the checker to see which one you're missing, then fix that first.

A low score is rarely about content quality - it's usually a plumbing problem you can't see from the front end. The report separates the two failure modes so you don't waste effort:

• "Claude can't reach or read you." An access or rendering issue - a crawler is blocked, or your content only exists after JavaScript runs. High impact, often a fast fix, and it caps everything else.
• "Claude can reach you but has no reason to pick you." A signal issue - weak entity data, no citable passages, or a thin third-party footprint. Slower to move, but it's what decides whether you're named versus merely readable.

Run it on your own domain, then run it on the competitor Claude keeps recommending instead of you - the gap between the two scores is usually the clearest brief you'll ever get for what to fix. Enter your URL to see where you stand, free.

Proof this pattern holds in the wild: across 1,038 UK accountancy firms SearchScore audited, 97% let AI crawl them yet only 18 (1 in 60) covered all five AI-readiness basics. Among 150+ London firms, the average GEO score was just 52.8/100 and only 4 reached the Strong tier. Being reachable is not the same as being recommended.