Claude visibility may depend heavily on Brave Search rankings, new data suggests

Claude's visibility in search results may be heavily influenced by Brave Search rankings, according to data shared by Jonathan Clark, managing partner at Moving Traffic Media. In a Zero Click by Profound session, Clark noted that Claude appears to directly utilize Brave's top 10 search results for its answers, rather than re-ranking them. This contrasts with other AI answer engines, as Claude used web search in only 36.6% of prompts, significantly less than ChatGPT's approximately 90%. Claude was more inclined to search when prompts indicated a need for freshness, rankings, location, or comparisons. For instance, recency-focused prompts like "best XYZ" triggered a web search 81% of the time, while ranking-focused prompts did so 67% of the time. Location and comparison prompts triggered searches 55% and 51% of the time, respectively. Further analysis revealed that Claude's citations overlapped with ChatGPT's in only 8% of cases for identical prompts. However, Claude's results showed a substantial 64% overlap with Google rankings, suggesting that Google SEO strategies might be more transferable to Claude than those targeting ChatGPT. This finding underscores the importance of tracking Brave rankings, as Clark stated that ranking well in Brave provides a measurable metric for Claude. Prompts seeking definitions or instructions, such as "how does" or "what is," were less likely to trigger a web search, preventing Claude from citing web pages. The data also indicated that Claude's query fan-outs were nearly deterministic, producing consistent results 65% of the time, which could facilitate testing.