There are only a few reasons Claude names someone else, and they are separable. Claude answers from model weights unless web search is enabled for the conversation. Cituna checks daily which brands Claude recommends and how often you are among them, then generates the fix for each gap.
How Claude actually decides
In Claude’s default mode there is no live retrieval at all, so what Claude says about your brand reflects what was in its training data, which is why the fix for Claude is slower and more structural than on the live-retrieval engines.
Its citations skew toward well-established, text-dense sources that were prominent at training time. In practice that means the surfaces worth auditing first are documentation sites, long-form editorial, Wikipedia, technical references.
The method, in order
Rule out reachability first. If ClaudeBot (training) and Claude-User (user-initiated fetches) cannot fetch your pages, nothing else on this list matters.
Write down the prompts where it names someone else, with the date and the brands it named, before you change anything. Asking the same prompts again later is the only way to tell whether a fix worked.
Check whether you are absent or merely outranked. Being unmentioned is a different problem from being mentioned third, and the fixes do not overlap.
Look at what it cites instead. Claude favours well-established, text-dense sources that were prominent at training time: if your competitors are present in documentation sites and you are not, that is usually the whole answer.
Check your claims are verifiable somewhere other than your own marketing. Engines corroborate; a claim that appears only on your homepage rarely survives into an answer.
Then fix the cheapest thing that moves: build durable, text-rich presence on sources that persist, the payoff is measured in months, not weeks.
The honest caveat
A brand founded or renamed recently can be absent from Claude entirely while doing well everywhere else, and no amount of on-page work fixes that quickly. It is the clearest example of why a single-engine tool misleads.
Cituna checks Claude daily alongside Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Grok, on the $39 Starter, and pairs the result with Google Search Console so a change here can be tied to real clicks. Then it does the work: it generates the fix for each gap, its AutoSEO writes and publishes the articles that answer the questions you are missing, and Claude or any other AI agent can work through the results over MCP.
Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.