Free tool · Anthropic
Can Claude actually cite you?
Four things have to be true before Claude can name your site in an answer. This checks all four against Anthropic’s own agents, and tells you which one is in the way.
01The catch
What most sites get wrong about Claude.
Anthropic runs three agents with similar names doing different jobs. Claude-User fetches a page because someone in a conversation asked for it, Claude-SearchBot fetches for search, and ClaudeBot collects training data. A rule written against the name Claude tends to catch all three.
Claude retrieves when the conversation calls for it rather than on every turn, so access is a precondition and not a trigger. Nothing here measures how often Claude chooses to go looking.
02Questions
- Which crawler does Claude use?
- Claude fetches pages at answer time using Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot. Anthropic separately runs ClaudeBot to collect training data, which is a different decision with different consequences.
- Why am I not showing up in Claude?
- Four things have to be true before citation is even possible: the answer-time agents can fetch the page, the content is in the HTML without JavaScript, the page carries structured data, and the business exists as an identifiable entity. This check reports all four. If they all pass and you are still absent, the constraint has moved to authority, which is about who else references you rather than anything on your own site.
- Does blocking ClaudeBot remove me from Claude?
- Not by itself. ClaudeBot collects training data, while Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot fetch pages at answer time. Blocking the training crawler and allowing the answer-time agents leaves live citation intact, and getting that pair the wrong way round is the most common way a site removes itself from answers by accident.
- Is this check free, and does it need an account?
- Free, with no account and no email. The check is HTTP and parsing rather than model calls, so it costs bandwidth rather than tokens, and a free tool that asks for an address before telling you anything is a lead form wearing a tool's clothes.
- Does passing this guarantee Claude will cite me?
- Claude retrieves when the conversation calls for it rather than on every turn, so access is a precondition and not a trigger. Nothing here measures how often Claude chooses to go looking.
03The other engines
Each engine uses different agents, so a site can be readable by one and invisible to another. The checks are separate for that reason.
Next
One engine is a sample, not a picture.
The full check scores all four preconditions across every engine at once, across twenty-three checks, with each finding traced back to a line in your HTML.