How to get your business recommended by Claude
What the September 2026 AIGROW Index shows about how Claude names businesses, what Anthropic says about how it reads the web, and the steps that follow from both.
By the AIGROW Team · data under CC BY 4.0
- Answers
- 15,141
- Names per answer
- 5.4
- Repeated when asked again
- 38.8%
- Named by no other assistant
- 69.8%
Claude recommends businesses from what it already knows and, with search on, from what it finds on the web. In the September 2026 AIGROW Index, asked with no web search, it named at least one local business in 35.7% of 15,141 answers, and no other assistant named 69.8% of the businesses it gave. Check each assistant separately.
What the Index shows about Claude
1,400 pages of the September 2026 edition, each question asked three times, with no web search.
Asked for a local business, Claude named at least one in 35.7% of its answers.
9,737 of 15,141 answers about local trades named no business. A failed call is not counted as an answer: 0 of 16,797 calls failed. About software, it named no one in 0.0% of 1,656 answers.
When it named someone, it gave 5.4 names per answer.
Local trades, counting only the answers that named someone. Among the four assistants, from 2.5 for ChatGPT to 5.4 for Claude. About software, Claude gave 5.1.
Asked the same question again, it repeated 38.8% of its names.
Each question was asked three times. For each one, the names that came back in at least two runs, as a share of every name those runs gave. Among the four assistants, from 38.8% for Claude to 61.1% for Grok.
69.8% of the businesses Claude named, no other assistant named on the same page.
11,347 of 16,251 different businesses, counted on the pages where another assistant also named someone. Being named by Claude says little about whether the others name you.
How Claude finds businesses
With no web search, Claude can name only businesses it learned about in training, which is what the figures above measure. With search on, it reads the web. What Anthropic says about that:
- Claude-SearchBot
- Indexes pages to improve Claude's search results. Anthropic says blocking it may reduce a site's visibility and accuracy in user search results.
- Claude-User
- Fetches a page when a Claude user asks a question that needs it.
- ClaudeBot
- Collects pages to train Anthropic's models, under a rule of its own.
Sources: Anthropic, how it crawls the web.
What to do, in this order
The first steps take an afternoon. Getting written about is the slow part, and the one that decides answers given without a search.
The four assistants side by side
The same kinds of questions, asked with no web search. Names per answer counts only the answers that named someone.
What this does not show
- No web search
- Every answer came from what the model already holds, asked with no web search, no location and no chat history. Claude in its own app, with search on, can answer differently.
- Asked directly
- The first pages of this edition went through a reseller since dropped from the Index, whose answers named someone far more often. This guide counts only the answers Claude gave when asked directly, on 1,400 pages, so its figures differ from the report's, which counts every call.
- One month
- These are the figures of the September 2026 edition. A new model can change any of them, and the next edition will show whether it did.
- The maker's words
- What Anthropic says about how it reads the web is quoted from its own documentation, as read in September 2026. Check it again before you act on it.
Does Claude name your business?
The free scan asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok your own customers' questions and shows who they name instead of you.
Edition September 2026 · data under CC BY 4.0