Claude
Claude is an AI assistant from the US company Anthropic, based on a large language model. Users ask questions in ordinary language, and Claude answers in full sentences. For GEO and SEO, Claude matters because it increasingly serves as an answer machine: it names brands, recommends providers and cites sources, instead of returning a classic list of results.
Why Claude matters for your visibility
More and more people no longer ask Google but an AI assistant like Claude: "Which tax advisor suits a small trade business?" or "Recommend me a family hotel in the Allgäu." Claude then answers with specific names, assessments and sometimes sources. Whoever is mentioned there gains attention before the user even opens a website. Whoever is missing does not appear at all in this new answer world. For you, that means: it is no longer enough to rank well only in classic search. You also have to make sure that language models know your brand, classify it correctly and recommend it in the right context. That is exactly the core of AI visibility.
How Claude works
Claude is what is called a large language model. Put simply, it has learned from enormous amounts of text which words typically follow one another, and it thus predicts a fitting answer word by word. Part of the knowledge is fixed in the model (from training), and part Claude can additionally fetch, in some products, from the internet or from documents. Anthropic offers Claude as a chat interface and via an interface for other programs. Important for you: Claude has no fixed index like a search engine. It forms answers out of what it has learned and just looked up. That is why the quality and clarity of your public content help decide how Claude talks about you.
Common mistakes
A widespread error is to treat Claude like a search engine and optimise only for keywords. Language models understand relationships, not keyword lists. A second mistake: trusting every statement blindly. Claude can invent things that sound plausible but are wrong. This is called hallucination. Always double-check important facts. Third, many underestimate the importance of unambiguous, consistent information on the web. If your company name, your services and your locations are stated differently everywhere, that confuses the model and the answers become inaccurate. And finally: results fluctuate. The same question can be answered differently depending on the wording and a random setting. So measure regularly instead of drawing conclusions from a single test.
Relevance to AI recommendations
Claude is one of the channels through which AI recommendations arise – alongside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. For your marketing this means: watch whether and how Claude mentions your brand, in what context and with what undertone. That is exactly what a visibility score or a mention rate measures. You cannot optimise this with tricks, but with clean, well-structured information: clear descriptions of your offer, solid facts, traceable sources and consistent details across all platforms. The more understandable and trustworthy your content is on the open web, the more readily Claude picks it up and reproduces it correctly. This turns pure search-engine work into a broader goal: being present in AI answers visibly, correctly and positively.
Example
A customer is planning a move and asks Claude: "Which moving companies in Leipzig work with fixed prices?" Instead of ten blue links she gets a short list of three providers, each with one sentence on its strength. A moving company whose website clearly describes prices, process and service area gets mentioned. A competitor with a vague self-presentation is missing, even though it has good reviews. The customer contacts only the companies named. For the unnamed business the job is lost, without it ever having heard about the enquiry.
Common questions
Is Claude the same as ChatGPT?
No. Both are AI assistants based on large language models, but they come from different companies: Claude from Anthropic, ChatGPT from OpenAI. They can answer the same question differently, so you should check your visibility in each of them separately.
Can I influence what Claude says about my brand?
You cannot control it directly. But you influence it indirectly by providing clear, correct and consistent information about your company on the open web. The more understandable your content, the more accurately Claude reproduces it.