How to check your Claude visibility (free tool)

Checking your Claude visibility means testing two things: whether Claude recalls your brand from training, and whether its web search can reach and cite your live pages. You can test the first with a few careful prompts and the second with a structured audit. Here is the full process, step by step.

Key takeaway: A meaningful Claude visibility check covers both of Claude’s answer paths. Ask Claude about your brand and category with web search off to test training-data recall, then again with web search on to test live citation. Then verify the plumbing: whether ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai and Claude-Web can crawl you, and whether your pages carry passages Claude can quote. The free Claude Visibility Checker automates the technical half in about 60 seconds.

Why check Claude visibility separately from ChatGPT?

Each AI engine sources its answers differently, so a check built for one quietly lies to you about the others. Claude answers from its own training data by default, and when its web search capability is enabled (in claude.ai, the Anthropic API and Claude Code) it fetches pages directly rather than reading Google’s index. Anthropic also runs its own named crawlers. That means you can be visible in ChatGPT and absent from Claude, or the reverse, and a Google rankings report will not show you either way.

Claude also reaches people in places a manual test cannot see. A large share of Claude usage happens through the API, inside other companies’ assistants and internal tools, and through Claude Code on developers’ machines. You cannot test those surfaces one by one, which is why the technical signals underneath them are what a structured check should measure.

Step 1: test what Claude recalls from training

Open claude.ai with web search switched off (or simply note when Claude answers without citing sources) and ask questions a real buyer would ask:

• “What can you tell me about [your company name]?”
• “What are the best [your product or service category] options in [your location or niche]?”
• “Recommend a [type of business] that specialises in [your specialism].”

Record three things for each answer: whether your brand is named at all, whether the description is accurate, and which competitors appear instead of you. If Claude describes you accurately without searching, your training-era footprint is working. If it has never heard of you, or confuses you with a similarly named company, your entity signals need work: that is a slow-burn fix built on consistent third-party references.

Step 2: test what Claude cites live

Now repeat the same questions with web search enabled. This tests a completely different system: Claude searching the web, opening pages and quoting what it can read right now.

Watch for the difference between being found and being cited. Claude may open your site but quote a competitor because their page states the answer in one liftable sentence while yours buries it. If your brand appears with a source link to your own domain, note which page Claude chose: that tells you what it considers your most quotable content.

Step 3: check whether Anthropic’s crawlers can reach you

Manual prompting tells you whether you appear, but not why not. The first technical check is robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for rules affecting these three agents:

• ClaudeBot, Anthropic’s main web crawler
• anthropic-ai, a user agent associated with Anthropic’s web data collection
• Claude-Web, the agent tied to Claude fetching pages from the web

All of them obey robots.txt, so a single blanket “block AI scrapers” rule, or a legacy User-agent: * disallow, can silence you across every Claude surface at once while your team assumes the site is wide open. In SearchScore’s SAVI benchmark, 38.8% of sites block at least one major AI crawler, usually without anyone having decided to.

Step 4: check whether your content is readable and quotable

Even with crawler access, two structural problems stop citations:

JavaScript-only content. If your key content only appears after client-side JavaScript runs, a crawler fetching your HTML sees an empty page. View your page source (not the rendered inspector) and confirm your main copy is actually in it.

No liftable passage. Claude cites the source it can quote cleanly. Check your most important pages against a simple test: is there a single, self-contained sentence near the top that answers the question the page targets? Across 850,000+ sites in the SAVI Report (April 2026 edition), the average on-page structure score is 23.1/100, which is why most sites are readable but never quoted.

Step 5: run a structured audit

Manual checks are useful but unsystematic. The free Claude Visibility Checker inspects the signals that govern both of Claude’s answer paths on any URL: reachability for each Anthropic crawler separately, server-rendering, entity clarity in your schema, citable answer-first structure, and the third-party recommendation strength that decides whether Claude names you over a competitor. It takes about 60 seconds, needs no signup, and returns a prioritised fix list.

A useful habit: run it on your own domain, then on the competitor Claude keeps recommending instead of you. The gap between the two scores is usually the clearest brief you will ever get for what to fix first.

How to read your results

A low score is rarely about content quality. The report separates two failure modes so you do not waste effort:

• “Claude can’t reach or read you.” An access or rendering issue: a crawler is blocked, or your content only exists after JavaScript runs. High impact, often a fast fix, and it caps everything else.
• “Claude can reach you but has no reason to pick you.” A signal issue: weak entity data, no citable passages, or a thin third-party footprint. Slower to move, but it decides whether you are named versus merely readable.

Fix access first, always. Nothing downstream matters if Anthropic’s crawlers cannot fetch your pages.

How often should you re-check?

Claude visibility is not static: models update, competitors publish, and your own site changes. A sensible cadence is a full re-check after every batch of fixes, then monthly. If you want it continuous, SearchScore’s Tracker puts real prompts to six live engines including Claude every week and counts exactly how often each one cites you, so you see movement instead of guessing.

What does a good result look like?

Benchmarks help you read your score honestly. Across the 850,000+ websites in the SAVI Report (April 2026 edition), the average AI Visibility score is 34.1/100, the average on-page structure score is 23.1/100, and only 0.2% of sites, fewer than 1 in 500, score as fully AI-Ready. Scoring above the mid-30s already puts you ahead of the typical site; the AI-Ready tier is where citations become likely rather than lucky.

The pattern holds in the wild. Across 1,038 UK accountancy firms SearchScore audited, 97% let AI crawl them, yet only 18 (1 in 60) covered all five AI-readiness basics. Among 150+ London firms the average GEO score was just 52.8/100. Being reachable is not the same as being recommended, and the gap between those two numbers is exactly what a Claude visibility check measures.

Related articles

• How Claude decides which websites to cite →
• Claude SEO guide: the full playbook →
• Why your website isn’t showing up in Claude →
• Free search visibility tools and checkers →

Sources & Further Reading

• Anthropic – Does Anthropic crawl data from the web? (ClaudeBot)
• SearchScore SAVI Report, April 2026 (850,000+ sites audited)
• Academic research – GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., arXiv)
• Schema.org – Organisation structured data reference