Anthropic

What it is

Anthropic was founded in 2021 and develops Claude, a range of models sold through consumer and business subscriptions and through an API for developers. The company publishes research on model behaviour, alignment and interpretability, and describes a training approach it calls Constitutional AI. It also released the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting models to external tools and data sources.

Why it matters

Claude is widely used for research, drafting and analysis in professional settings, so the way it describes your category, your product and your competitors shapes decisions before anyone lands on your site. When Claude uses web search, it can surface and cite sources, which creates a small but growing referral channel and a much larger influence channel. Anthropic's crawler also visits sites, so publishers need a deliberate position on what it may access.

How it works

Practitioners track Anthropic in three ways: as an answer surface, by running representative buyer prompts in Claude and recording which brands and sources are named; as a traffic source, by watching referrals from claude.ai in analytics; and as a crawler, by checking user agents such as ClaudeBot in server logs and setting robots.txt rules to match their licensing stance. Teams also use the API to build internal tools for content analysis, classification and research.

When it applies

This applies to any brand whose buyers use AI assistants during research, and to any publisher deciding which crawlers to allow. It is also relevant when choosing a model provider for internal marketing tooling.

Examples

• A B2B team runs 30 buyer questions in Claude each month and logs how often their brand is named alongside competitors.
• A publisher sets an explicit robots.txt rule for ClaudeBot after reviewing crawl volume in server logs.
• An agency builds an internal tool on the Claude API that clusters customer support tickets into content briefs.

How it is measured

• Brand mention rate across a fixed set of Claude prompts, tracked over time
• Referral sessions and assisted conversions from claude.ai
• ClaudeBot requests in server logs, by page type and response code
• Share of cited sources that are owned pages versus third-party coverage