Ever since AI (Artificial Intelligence)-powered search tools started to become part of our personal and professional lives, businesses have looked for ways to increase their brand visibility in these areas.
Unlike traditional search engines, AI-driven tools like Claude draw on, and cite, external sources when generating conversational responses to users’ queries.
This creates a new opportunity for businesses to have their content discovered, referenced, and cited by Claude and then presented to its millions of users.
While this advanced AI assistant was developed by Anthropic – a company founded by former OpenAI researchers – it’s distinct from OpenAI’s model, ChatGPT.
Widely praised for its reliability, reasoning, and thoughtful, analytical thinking, the Claude model gives websites the opportunity to appear in front of a wide audience of professionals, but only if they’re optimised appropriately.
So, what makes content citable by ChatGPT and Claude and other AI platforms?
And what can you do to increase the chances of Claude discovering, referencing, and presenting your content to their mammoth user base?
In this guide, we explore how Claude determines which sources are worth citing as well as what steps you can take as a business or website to increase the chances of Claude surfacing and referencing your content.
How is Claude different to ChatGPT?
Convinced that all AI-powered chatbots and assistants are essentially the same?
If so, you might make the natural assumption that optimising your website for ChatGPT means it’s now fully optimised for Claude, too.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
While both ChatGPT and Claude utilise conversational technology to talk with their users, they have different purposes, strengths, and levels of functionality, changing the overall user experience as well as what they look for in external sources.
User needs
ChatGPT tends to present information using generic structures (with headings and bullet points) and excels at web browsing, while Claude adopts a more human and natural writing style and is often favoured for coding and software engineering tasks.
Subsequently, given each tool serves different user needs, they attract distinct audiences.
Source criteria
ChatGPT and Claude also have different criteria when deciding whether to cite an external source.
ChatGPT tends to rely on gathering information from many different sources.
Claude, on the other hand, adopts a more selective and cautious approach to choosing sources – often opting for fewer and ensuring they align closely with the specific wording of the user prompt.
Why optimise your content for Claude?
According to SQ Magazine’s breakdown of popular AI search tool statistics, Anthropic’s Claude now serves more than 300,000 business customers, with more than 500 of those spending more than $1 million annually.
While there is a free, basic version of the AI assistant, users can also increase usage capacity and secure priority access by opting for one of their paid plans: Claude Pro or Claude Max.
While every AI tool has its individual advantages and weaknesses, Claude is becoming a fond favourite among analysts, writers, software developers, technical professionals, and consultants, but why?
Some of the widely purported reasons that this tool is quietly increasing in popularity among white-collar workers include its ability to:
- Produce thoughtful responses
- Competently handle complex tasks
- Read and synthesise lengthy documents
- Write content with a clear and natural tone
- Stay on topic during long conversations
As a result, if you provide a product or service that’s more likely to appeal to this kind of audience, then it may well be worth optimising your content for Claude.
Can you buy citations in Claude’s responses?
No, you cannot buy citations for your business, website, products, or services in Claude’s responses.
This is because Claude doesn’t provide any kind of paid-for or sponsored citations, meaning all citations must be earned organically and optimisation is crucial.
What does Claude look for in external sources?
Brand mentions
Unlike traditional search engines which historically paid more attention to site backlinks to assess authority, Claude can use general brand visibility and organic mentions to help discern the perceived authority of a business.
These mentions might be embedded within reviews, found on community forum posts, or even published within content from local news outlets.
Depth of content
When choosing what to cite, Claude likes deep content!
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean the longer the piece of content the better, but it does mean that content with verifiable facts, primary research, an academic and professional tone, and clear citations is often favoured.
Clear structure
Alongside deep content, Claude – like many other AI tools and even humans – is fond of clear structure. Defined sections, headings, and direct answers all help Claude to accurately extract and cite sources.
Fortunately, adopting this approach to content creation also makes content easier to digest for humans, so it’s a win-win!
Author and source credibility
Just like humans, Claude is more likely to trust a source if it can demonstrate clear credibility. Some of these trust signals include professional qualifications, author bylines in trusted publications, and entity consistency across official registries.
How to optimise your content for Claude
For anyone searching for a clear answer to ‘How do I optimise content for Claude?’ we can help.
Because Claude prioritises sources that demonstrate genuine authority, relevance, and accuracy, website owners who want their content to be discovered and cited by Claude should consider:
Digital PR (Public Relations)
Digital PR can help businesses to significantly increase their credibility as well as the number of brand mentions they receive – especially from trusted third-party publications.
This digital marketing activity involves creating compelling stories and pitching them to journalists, influencers, and publications to earn media coverage, backlinks, and brand mentions across the web.
While traditional backlinks from topically relevant and reputable websites still have a valuable place in supporting the overall online visibility of a website, building brand visibility in Claude can be as simple as securing mere mentions.
SEO
One way to deliver on depth of content is by utilising SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) services.
Any good SEO campaign always starts with a content strategy. That means picking a focus you want to drive visibility for (this might be energy-efficient air conditioners or a local gardening service) and identifying topical content that can be written around it.
To capture Claude’s attention, any content you create from this strategy should be specific, high-quality, backed by verifiable facts and figures (ideally from primary research), and written in a formal, professional tone – rather than brief, conversational, and vague.
With a strong SEO strategy aimed at increasing your visibility in AI responses, you can ensure all the content you create is fully optimised for Claude.
Clear structuring
Another essential element of SEO is carrying out technical fixes, which include both on-page and off-page changes relating to structure.
In terms of on-page changes, good structure means ensuring your content is broken down into clearly defined sections and data formats, complete with appropriate hierarchical headings, and information that’s easy for both AI tools and humans to understand.
SEO can also help with off-page optimisation by implementing the relevant structured data, like schema markup. As there are many different types of schemas, including FAQ, article, and organisation markup, this helps Claude and other AI tools to identify the page type and extract relevant information.
Consistent branding
To help Claude determine whether your site and business is credible, consistent branding is also key.
This covers not only your primary brand messaging (logo, tagline, etc.) on registries and social media platforms, but also how you’re perceived by multiple entities, such as trusted third-party publications and even your customers.
Consistent branding therefore plays a key role in reinforcing credibility as well as reducing ambiguity and confusion by helping Claude to clearly differentiate between similar brands.
Explore AI tool optimisation with Aqueous
There’s no corner you can turn – both on the internet and in real life – nowadays without running into AI.
Whether it’s a chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT, AI-generated content on your favourite website, or a new AI-powered tool introduced into your daily workplace operations, you’re never too far away from an AI solution.
That’s why Aqueous Digital provides a comprehensive AI SEO service.
Designed to help your business or website increase its visibility in AI search results, this service reshapes SEO strategies to keep organisations’ products and services in front of their target audience – no matter what search tool they might be using.
Ready to learn more about AI and the impact it’s having on search? To book your free, no-obligation consultation and website audit, get in touch with our helpful team today!
Alongside contacting us online, we also welcome calls made to 0800 285 1424 as well as email enquiries sent to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk.
