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In my last article, I tackled the broad million-dollar question: How do I get my business to appear on ChatGPT?
The short version was that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is not some completely separate discipline from SEO. You still need a technically sound website, authoritative content, third-party mentions, reviews and a clear digital footprint.
While these principles are true across many different AI assistants, there are some nuances. The platforms search the web differently, use different crawlers and don’t necessarily cite the same sources.
So, if your goal is specifically to get your business recommended by Claude (which, it probably is if you care about showing up on ChatGPT), here is the article on how to do that.
First things first, there are a few distinctions worth understanding.
When Claude decides that a question requires current or specialized information, it can search the live web, review multiple results and use those sources to build its answer. Anthropic says Claude can also run multiple progressive searches, refining what it looks for as it learns more.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because ChatGPT does something quite similar. But, predictably, the infrastructure behind the two platforms is different.
OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to discover content for ChatGPT Search. OpenAI also notes that ChatGPT may receive results from third-party search providers when answering questions.
Anthropic, meanwhile, uses Claude-SearchBot for search discovery and Claude-User when an individual user prompts Claude to access specific web content.
The search ecosystem feeding those results also differs.
Independent research has found a strong relationship between Claude’s citations and Brave Search results. One 2026 analysis of roughly 35,000 URLs found that about 79% of the URLs Claude cited also appeared in Brave’s top 10 results.
ChatGPT primarily uses Bing, though some experts feel that may be changing. Whether that means moving toward Google or incorporating a proprietary search or another route entirely, at this time, no one knows.
And one strange wrinkle: Anthropic confirms that Claude’s image search is powered by Bing, even though its text-search results appear to behave much more like Brave.
These wrinkles mean that ranking well on Google alone doesn’t necessarily mean Claude will see the web the same way Google does (nor does ChatGPT). Google still matters of course, but now Bing, Brave, and other factors come into play.
Welcome to AI Search. It’s simple!
Claude doesn’t simply repeat a traditional search results page.
When web search is triggered, it evaluates the results it receives and chooses the sources it considers useful to support its answer. Anthropic’s system is designed to include direct citations and source links when information is pulled from the live web.
For a South Carolina business owner, the important takeaway is that Claude may cite:
In other words, you can’t rely on only your website to say good things about your business. You are trying to build enough evidence all across the web so that Claude can independently reach that conclusion from all the different inputs it gathers. This is true for ChatGPT, Gemini, and many others.
There is one technical box to check before worrying about anything else.
Make sure your website isn’t blocking Anthropic’s search crawlers.
For visibility in Claude search, the two names worth knowing are:
Claude-SearchBot — used in connection with Claude’s search functionality.
Claude-User — accesses pages when a Claude user specifically requests information from them.
If your robots.txt, firewall or CDN is blocking those crawlers, you may be limiting Claude’s ability to access your content.
Now, back to the marketing content instead of all the technical details.
There is no published formula that says five reviews + three backlinks + a Charleston service page = Claude recommendation.
I recommend to most people we work with to optimize your website content and citations across the web so that the information about you is concise and clear.
This seems obvious, until you go read your website and realize you haven’t updated it in years.
A website filled with phrases like:
“Creating innovative solutions that move businesses forward.”
sounds fantastic. Except that it tells Claude basically nothing.
Compare that with:
“We provide website services, SEO, and Google Ads for businesses throughout Charleston and South Carolina.”
That’s considerably easier for both humans and machines to understand. Claude (and other AI agents) reward that.
Your services, industries and geographic markets should be painfully obvious.
Like we said before, Claude often searches when a question is specific, current, or requires outside information, which makes conversational, “long-tail” content particularly interesting – if you understand your target audience well enough.
For example, a Charleston contractor might publish useful content answering:
How much does it cost to build a custom home in Charleston?
A law firm could answer:
What should I do after a car accident in South Carolina?
A yacht brokerage might cover:
What should I know before buying a yacht in Charleston?
These pages aren’t magical Claude keywords – they’re just genuinely useful content that your customers are actually asking. AI rewards this kind of helpful content.
This is probably the most important GEO concept for SC small business owners to understand.
Your own website is only one data point. It’s an important one, but still only one (1).
If Claude searches for the “best companies in [industry] and [location]”, it will almost certainly encounter directories, news articles, association websites, reviews, and other third-party sources before your own website.
That means traditional authority-building still matters:
The more credible sources independently connect your company with a particular service, market or expertise, the easier it becomes for an AI system to understand that relationship. All of this is evidence.
Claude’s web search responses include citations automatically when it uses information from search results.
So make your content easy to extract and understand.
Use:
Don’t bury the answer underneath 800 words of marketing fluff.
If somebody asks Claude:
“Does Company X provide commercial roofing in Charleston?”
you want that answer to be extraordinarily easy to verify.
This is where I’d start if you’re curious about how your company currently performs.
Ask Claude the questions your customers are likely asking.
For example:
“Who are the best commercial contractors in Charleston?”
“Recommend a digital marketing company in South Carolina.”
“What companies provide managed WordPress hosting in Charleston?”
“Who should I hire for local SEO in Greenville, SC?”
Then look beyond whether your company appears.
Look at:
Which competitors appear repeatedly?
Which websites does Claude cite?
Do those same websites rank prominently on Brave?
What third-party sources mention those competitors?
What content do they have that you don’t?
Run several variations because AI search is non-deterministic. Appearing in one search might be exciting, but patterns across ten searches are actually useful.
If you got to the end of this article and thought “I need to change everything” – pump the brakes. I’m not recommending that a small business build one marketing strategy for Google, another for ChatGPT, and another for Claude.
Instead, ensure you’re building a consistent strong digital presence that all of these systems can understand. The inputs often matter more than the outputs.
That means:
Strong SEO (remember, GEO & AEO are just good SEO)
Good content
Clear service and location information
Real reviews
Credible third-party mentions
Technically accessible websites
Regular measurement and reporting to understand how the search landscape is moving (and it’s moving fast, people)
The underlying principles aren’t changing nearly as quickly as the interfaces are.
At Colophon New Media, we help South Carolina businesses improve their visibility across Google and emerging AI search platforms including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.
We look at the entire picture: technical SEO, content, local search, paid advertising, website structure, and the newer GEO considerations influencing how AI platforms discover and recommend companies.
If you’re asking Claude about your industry and seeing competitors show up instead of you, get in touch with us and we’ll figure out how to change that together.
Or schedule a meeting to talk through your SEO and AI search visibility.
And if you mention this article, we’ll send you our “10 SEO/GEO Practices that Require Zero Marketing Skill (Or Budget!)” for South Carolina small business owners.
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