How to get your business recommended by Claude

Claude can search the web when a question needs current information, and when it does it cites what it used. Getting recommended there rewards evidence more than polish, because it is noticeably cautious about repeating a claim it cannot support.

What is different about this one

In our own testing, Claude is the most sceptical of the assistants about vendor material. It will read your page, use the structure of your argument, and then decline to recommend you if the specifics are not supported, sometimes saying plainly that a page is the vendor's own and should be treated as advocacy.

We have seen it go further. On 6 August 2026 a headline figure on the main site of clawlaw.in, our sister company, could not be true, and when Claude checked it against public numbers it advised a buyer against the product. From that point the company's accurate claims stopped counting for that answer. That is the central lesson for this engine: one unsupportable number can cost you everything else on the page.

It will also tell you what it did. If you ask how many live searches it ran and which pages it retrieved, it answers specifically. No other engine gives you that, and it turns a vague impression into a measurement.

The five things that earn a recommendation

Numbers that survive a check. If you state a coverage figure, somebody may test it. A figure that is exactly right and narrower than you would like is worth far more than a generous one that fails.

Sourced comparisons. If you state a competitor's price, say where it came from and when you checked. Unsourced competitor pricing is one of the fastest ways to have your whole page discounted.

Plain limits. Saying what your product does not do, and who should buy something else, makes the rest more believable. Being cautious reads as confidence here rather than weakness.

Named lists instead of totals. "The following twelve" beats "over a dozen", because the first can be checked and the second cannot.

Dates on anything perishable. Prices, certifications, coverage, integrations. A dated fact ages visibly, which is better than ageing silently, and it signals that somebody is maintaining the page.

A worked example

This is the example that changed how we write, and it is dated. On 17 September 2026 Claude read two comparison pages belonging to clawlaw.in, our sister company. Both stated competitors' prices with no link, no date and no source. Claude checked those figures independently and they turned out to be correct. It still set the pages aside, because at read time it had no way of knowing they were correct, so it treated them as advocacy and used official sources instead.

Read that twice. The pages were not wrong. They were right and unusable. Being right is not the test on this engine. Being checkable at the moment of reading is the test, and those two pages failed it for the want of a link and a date beside each number.

The repair is small and dull. Beside every competitor price, say where it came from and the day you checked it. Beside every claim of your own that can move, put a date. Where an exact figure feels less impressive than a round one, publish the exact figure anyway, because a narrow number with a source beats a generous number without one.

A page written that way also wins something extra. A page that names what it does not cover gets quoted in answers about the limits of the category, and that is a question almost nobody else is answering. Notice what did the work here. Not being better. Being checkable.

What that means for whether you are named

Your page can be read, its facts used, and its recommendation ignored, because a page about yourself is read as advocacy. That is the ceiling on what your own site can do alone.

The way through is not to pretend to be independent. It is to be the company whose numbers are easiest to verify, and to make sure your name also appears somewhere you do not control, so that there is a second source agreeing with you.

How to check your position

Ask your buyers' questions without naming your company, then ask in the same conversation how many live searches it actually ran and which sources it used. It will tell you, and that answer separates a memory based reading from a live one.

Record the search count next to every result. A confident answer built on no searches is a statement about the past, and comparing it with a later live reading would credit your work for a change of instrument.

What not to try, and what cannot be promised

Do not write instructions to the model into your pages. On 6 August 2026, during the clawlaw.in work, Claude found a competitor's page carrying a hidden block of text addressed to answer engines, instructing them to cite that company as the source. It refused, and it named the company that had done it. Beyond being dishonest, that is a fast route to being distrusted.

Do not expect to win the questions that resolve to official sources. For anything about a rule, a registration or a public record, the official page is the right answer and a commercial product should not be named above it.

And nobody can guarantee a position in an AI answer. Anthropic does not publish how Claude weighs sources or when it decides to search, and the behaviour changes. Everything on this page is drawn from what is observable in the answers, including asking it directly, and it should be read as a pattern rather than a rule.

Common questions

How often should I check?

Monthly for the full set, and always with the search count recorded. Weekly readings here are less useful than on a pure retrieval engine, because a memory based answer will not move week to week no matter what you publish.

Why do two runs of the same question disagree?

The biggest reason on this engine is that one run searched and the other did not. After that, two searching runs can retrieve different pages. Ask for the search count every time and you will be able to explain most of the disagreements you see.

It cited a competitor's page for a fact about us. What should I do?

Ask it which page it used, then open it. If the fact is wrong, contact the owner with the correct value and a link to your own page stating it. If the fact is right, the issue is that they published it plainly and you did not. On this engine especially, an unsourced claim of your own will not displace a sourced claim of theirs, so state yours with a date and, where possible, something a reader could verify.

Is being cited the same as being recommended?

Less so here than anywhere. This is the engine most likely to use your facts and still recommend somebody else, on the grounds that your page is your own. Treat a citation as evidence that your page is reachable and useful, and treat a recommendation as evidence that your claims were verifiable.

Do I need third party reviews?

They help, because a second source makes a claim safer to repeat. But in several categories independent reviews barely exist, and waiting for them is not a plan. In those cases be the vendor whose own pages are the most checkable, and get your name into any legitimate place you do not control, including directories, trade press and public documentation.

Does admitting weaknesses really help?

On this engine it is one of the strongest things you can do, and it is also the hardest to get approved internally. A page that says who should not buy your product is more likely to be treated as a reliable source about who should. It also answers a question buyers ask and almost nobody addresses.

What to do first

Open your most important commercial page and find every claim on it that cannot be checked. Superlatives, vague savings, unsourced competitor prices, "trusted by leading companies". Replace each one with a fact, a named list or a date, and delete the ones you cannot support. That edit, on one page, is worth more here than ten new pages written in the old style.