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 increasingly used, including for business purposes. A blind spot, then, and one that's easy to close.

01 / the two routesHow Claude gets 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 training. You have no short-term influence over that; that knowledge is fixed until the next model version.

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

The distinction between these routes also explains why answers can differ so much. Without web search, Claude describes a market as it looked during the training period, and small or young businesses simply don't feature in that. 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 that your target client actually asks, without your business name in them.
2. Ask them to Claude with web search on and note, for each question, whether you're mentioned, and who is.
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.

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

03 / the accessClaudeBot needs to be able to get in

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

Anyone who only tests 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 to be respected, as long as it's a choice. The full consideration 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 increasingly used 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 the answer to.

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 was the platform on which we had the least visibility ourselves, precisely because we never tested it. The platforms that are easiest to check get checked most often, and that says nothing about where your clients 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 client 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.