Claude Citations are the source links Claude surfaces when it answers a question using web search: the pages it read, referenced, and chose to attribute in its response.
Why it matters
When Claude has web search enabled, it behaves like an answer engine: it fetches live pages, synthesizes an answer, and cites the sources it leaned on. If a founder asks Claude for "the best tool for X" and your product appears in the cited sources, you get named in the recommendation. If you don't, a competitor does. Anthropic's crawler, ClaudeBot, also gathers web content, so blocking it in robots.txt can quietly remove you from Claude's view of the market. Community sources like Reddit threads and independent review pages tend to carry weight because they read as third-party opinion rather than vendor copy.
How to use it
- Run your money prompts ("best [category] tool", "[competitor] alternatives") in Claude with web search on, and log which URLs it cites. Repeat monthly, as answers shift.
- Check that ClaudeBot is allowed in your robots.txt and that your key pages return clean, crawlable HTML.
- Invest in the source types Claude actually cites for your category, typically comparison pages, community threads, and reviews, and track movement as part of your broader AI visibility work.
Related terms
Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.
