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. In its default mode there is no live retrieval at all, so what it says about your brand reflects what was in its training data: which is why the fix here is slower and more structural than on the live-retrieval engines.. Claude answers from model weights unless web search is enabled for the conversation. In its default mode there is no live retrieval at all, so what it says about your brand reflects what was in its training data: which is why the fix here is slower and more structural than on the live-retrieval engines.
How Claude actually decides
Claude answers from model weights unless web search is enabled for the conversation. In its default mode there is no live retrieval at all, so what it says about your brand reflects what was in its training data: which is why the fix here 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.
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 the other five engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews, on the $39 Starter, and pairs the result with Google Search Console so a change here can be tied to real clicks. We do not track Microsoft Copilot.
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.