It’s Time to Optimize for Claude (and Here’s How)

Everyone is optimizing for ChatGPT right now, and that’s understandable given the volume. However, while the crowd lines up at the same window, another answer engine is growing, and this one is populated mainly by… professionals. If you sell to businesses, ignoring it is starting to cost you.

Here’s why to target Claude now, and how to do it right.

Why Claude Deserves Its Own Strategy

Let’s start with a number that’s hard to ignore. In SparkToro and Datos’s State of Search Q1 2026 report, Claude was the AI tool that saw the strongest acceleration of the quarter: in the US, its share of desktop users went from 3.58% to 8.54% in a single quarter, and in Europe (EU and UK) from 3.77% to 9.61%. That’s basically more than doubling in three months, while Perplexity, Copilot, and DeepSeek stayed flat (source).

However, the really telling number comes from somewhere else: AI referral traffic. In May-August 2025, ChatGPT captured 89% of B2B visits. Today it captures 63%, while Claude went from 1.4% to 18.5%. Meaning nearly one in five AI-driven visits to B2B sites now comes from Claude, where it was almost nonexistent a year ago (source).

And unlike many platforms, Fishkin observes that mainstream AI adoption appears to be plateauing while professional and business use keeps climbing. Claude recorded four consecutive months of growth from December to March in the Datos data. The target here isn’t the biggest volume in the market, it’s the most qualified audience for anyone billing professional services.

How Claude Retrieves Your Content

Good news: Anthropic clarified things by updating its crawler documentation on February 20, 2026. There isn’t one Claude bot, there are three (source), each with a distinct role:

• ClaudeBot: the training crawler. It collects public content that may feed future models.
• Claude-User: triggered when a user asks a question that requires fetching a page in real time.
• Claude-SearchBot: it crawls and evaluates content quality to produce search-type responses.

If the names sound slightly familiar, that’s not a coincidence. OpenAI uses the same naming conventions for ChatGPT.

These are the bots to watch in your server logs. Also worth knowing: Claude is known for aggressive crawls that can strain servers. Blocking ClaudeBot can help short-term, however it will prevent your content from appearing in the LLM’s offline data.

Concrete Optimization Levers

Several actions seem to work particularly well with Claude:

Markdown files

I covered how to create and use Markdown files to your advantage in a previous issue. One useful clarification: ChatGPT seems to prefer inline Markdown (embedded directly in the HTML) rather than a separate .md file that mirrors the main page.

In my tests, Claude was the only one that consistently fetched the .md files, while they were largely ignored by other LLMs. Meaning you can use plenty of extensions to generate those .md files automatically, which is harder and sometimes more expensive with inline Markdown integration.

Keep in mind that .md variants can have a real impact on your crawl budget if you run a large site. That concern doesn’t apply with inline.

Structured text for extraction

Just like Google appreciates a direct answer to the main question, Claude (and most other AI assistants) prefers direct answers at the top of each section, backed by fresh, sourced data.

The higher the key content sits on the page, the more likely Claude is to see and use it. This comes down to the limited number of tokens used to process each page. Basically, like its peers, it doesn’t ingest an entire page.

Being visible in Brave Search

Unlike most AI assistants that use Google and Bing, Claude relies on Brave Search for web queries. That means making sure your site is properly indexed there, with up-to-date content.

However, there’s no Search Console equivalent. Sites are crawled through the Web Discovery Project (WDP), an option you activate in the Brave browser settings once it’s installed (source). They essentially use their users’ browsing activity to index the web.

Once that’s set up, simply visit your sites using the Brave browser and you’re done.

In Summary

Claude isn’t the biggest engine on the market, and that’s not the point. It’s the engine where a growing share of your prospects likely lives, the one that saw its biggest historical jump last quarter, and the one not many in the English-speaking market are optimizing for seriously (yet). Basically, a window of opportunity. Use it before it closes.