How to Check If Claude Recommends Your Brand: Manual Steps and Tools (2026)

If your buyers use Claude to research a purchase, it is worth knowing whether it names your brand when someone asks for a recommendation in your category. This guide shows how to check by hand in about an hour, what Anthropic documents about the bots that read your site, why Claude may leave you out, and which tools track Claude for you.

The short answer: ask Claude your buyers' questions in an incognito chat, once with web search off and once with it on, log who is named and which pages are cited, and repeat on several days. If you would rather have Claude checked every day without the spreadsheet, Cituna tracks Claude on every plan, next to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode.

For the same check on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, see how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business. This guide covers only what is specific to Claude.

What is different about checking Claude?

Four things in Anthropic's own help pages change how you run the check:

• Web search is a setting, not a given. Anthropic's web search article says you turn it on from the + button in the lower left of the chat by choosing Web search, and choose it again to turn it off. In the new Claude experience there is no toggle: Claude searches when it decides that helps. On Team and Enterprise plans, an Owner or Primary Owner must first enable web search under Organization settings, then Capabilities (Anthropic: enable and use web search, read 24 October 2026).
• Searched answers show their sources. The same article says every response includes citations, so you can see which pages Claude relied on. That source list is the most useful thing you will record.
• Location can change the answer. Anthropic says Claude may infer your approximate location from your IP address for localized results.
• Memory can bias the answer. If you have discussed your company with Claude before, its memory may steer it. Anthropic says an incognito chat does not use Claude's existing memory and is not saved to it; incognito is available on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, for chats outside projects (Anthropic: use incognito chats, read 24 October 2026).

How to check if Claude recommends your brand, step by step

You need a Claude account (the free plan works, within its usage limits) and a spreadsheet.

1. Write 10 to 15 buyer questions

Write the questions a buyer types before they contact you, in their words. Mix four kinds:

• Category: "What is the best payroll software for a 20-person agency?"
• Problem: "How do I stop late client payments without chasing every invoice?"
• Comparison: "Is [your top rival] worth it, or is there a better option for small teams?"
• Constraint: "Which CRM works for a team that sells in Arabic and English?"

Your sales and support inbox is the best source for the wording.

2. Open an incognito chat

Start a new chat outside any project and click the ghost icon in the upper right to turn on incognito mode. The chat shows a black border and an "Incognito chat" label. Running the check outside a project also keeps project files and instructions out of the answer.

3. Ask each question with web search off

If your account shows the + menu with a Web search option, make sure it has no checkmark, then ask the question. If you have the new experience with no toggle, add "Answer without searching the web" to the question; Anthropic's help page says you can tell Claude not to search. This answer shows what Claude says about your category without reading live pages.

4. Ask the same question with web search on

Start a fresh incognito chat, choose +, then Web search, so a checkmark appears, and ask again. In the new experience, add "Search the web" to the question; Anthropic says that makes Claude more likely to search. This answer is closer to what a buyer gets when Claude looks things up.

5. Log the answer and its sources

Give each answer one row with these columns:

The sources column tells you where Claude learns about your category. After a few days, look for the sites that keep coming back: those are the pages to study.

6. Repeat on at least three different days

One run is not enough. In Cituna's published data for 25 buyer prompts scanned from 18 to 23 October 2026, Claude named 60% of the same tools the next day, and across seven engines only 13% of answers named exactly the same tools as the day before (Cituna: how often do AI answers change, read 24 October 2026). Count how often you are named across all runs rather than trusting one answer. Our guide to measuring AI share of voice shows how to turn the rows into one number.

7. Ask Claude about your brand directly

Ask "What is [your brand]?", "[your brand] pricing" and "[your brand] vs [top rival]", with web search on. Note anything out of date or wrong, and which page Claude cited for it.

8. Check that Anthropic's bots can reach your site

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines naming ClaudeBot, Claude-User or Claude-SearchBot, and for a "User-agent: *" group with "Disallow: /". Anthropic says its bots honor robots.txt, so a rule there decides what they can read. Check each subdomain too, since Anthropic says opt-outs apply per subdomain.

What does Anthropic say about its crawlers?

Anthropic documents three bots in its help article on crawling (Anthropic: does Anthropic crawl data from the web, dated 7 April 2026, read 24 October 2026):

Three more points from the same article:

• To block a bot, add a group such as User-agent: ClaudeBot with Disallow: / to the robots.txt file in your top-level directory, and repeat it for every subdomain.
• Anthropic supports the non-standard Crawl-delay rule if you only want to slow crawling down.
• Blocking Anthropic's IP addresses may not work as an opt-out, because it stops Anthropic reading your robots.txt. Anthropic publishes a list of its crawler IPs so you can confirm a visit is genuine.

So a site that blocks ClaudeBot to stay out of training can still allow Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot, which are the two tied to appearing in Claude's searched answers.

Why might Claude not name your brand?

If your rows show few or no mentions, work through the likely causes in this order:

• Its bots are blocked. A robots.txt rule or firewall that stops Claude-User or Claude-SearchBot is the one cause Anthropic documents directly. Fix it first.
• The search-off answer cannot see recent changes. Without web search, Claude answers without reading live pages, so a new product, a new name or a recent price change may be missing. Compare your search-off and search-on rows: if you appear only with search on, your pages are doing their job.
• The pages Claude cites do not mention you. Read the URLs in your sources column. If they are roundups and review pages that list your rivals and not you, that is the gap to work on, through outreach, reviews and honest comparison pages. The same work applies across engines; see why a brand does not show up in ChatGPT, and how to fix it.
• Your own pages do not answer the question plainly. A page that states who you serve, what you cost and how you compare, in text near the top, is easier to quote. Our guide to getting cited with llms.txt, schema and FAQ pages covers the on-page work.
• Normal variation. If you appear on some days and not others, you are in the running. Keep the same questions and track the rate over weeks.

None of the Anthropic help pages linked here offers a report of how often Claude cites your site, so asking Claude, by hand or with a tool, is the way to find out.

Which tools track Claude automatically?

A tracker asks the same questions on a schedule, keeps every answer and its sources, and shows the trend. Engine coverage varies: some include Claude on the entry plan, some sell it as an add-on, and some keep it for enterprise contracts. Prices are the cheapest plan, billed monthly, as each vendor's page showed on the date given.

Facts for tools other than Cituna come from each vendor's pricing and product pages as recorded on this site on the dates shown; see Keyword.com, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs, LLM Pulse, Promptwatch, Trakkr, AthenaHQ and Peec AI. SE Visible listed Claude as coming soon on 29 September 2026.

For a one-off look: Rank.ai's free check asks ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini through their APIs with web search on and shows whether each names and cites you (Rank.ai, read 24 October 2026). GeoBuddy's checker runs the same test on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, with 3 free checks and no signup (GeoBuddy, read 24 October 2026). An API check is not the same session a buyer sees in the Claude app, so treat it as a starting point. More free options are in our free AI visibility checkers roundup.

For daily tracking: Cituna asks your questions on Claude every day on every plan and records which brands and pages each answer names, with Google Search Console built in on paid plans. It does not track Microsoft Copilot; if Copilot matters to you, Keyword.com, Otterly.AI, Ahrefs and AthenaHQ list it. See Cituna's Claude rank tracker or Cituna in our directory. For a broader comparison of trackers, see the best AI visibility tracking tools.

What to do first

1. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt today and confirm Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot are not blocked.
2. Write your 10 to 15 questions and run them in an incognito chat, web search off and on.
3. Log every answer and every cited URL, and repeat on two more days.
4. Read the cited pages that name your rivals and not you, and pick the three you could realistically appear on.
5. If you need Claude checked every day, alongside the other engines your buyers use, set up a tracker such as Cituna, whose Starter plan covers Claude for $49 a month.

Sources

• Anthropic, Enable and use web search, read 24 October 2026.
• Anthropic, Use incognito chats, read 24 October 2026.
• Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?, dated 7 April 2026, read 24 October 2026.
• Cituna, "How often do AI answers change?" (cituna.com/learn), updated 24 October 2026; Cituna plan facts from cituna.com/pricing, read 24 October 2026.
• Rank.ai and GeoBuddy checker pages, read 24 October 2026; other vendors on the dates in the table.