| Research overview | The conclusions and the key data, shortened |
|---|---|
| Blog post with the full details | How Claude Turns Brave Search Results Into Citations |
What the research found
Anthropic lists Brave Search as a subprocessor for Claude’s web search. I wanted to see what that looks like in practice. Brave returns about 20 results per search, and a filter in Claude’s search tool keeps about 9. Claude then reads a short extract from each page and cites about half of them. I also tried downloading every result page to check the text. Nearly everything Claude recommends is named or linked in the pages it received.
Findings you can quote
- Claude’s search tool delivered 21,203 results. Of those, 95.8% appear in Brave’s top 20 for the same query, and 99.3% of the matched results have identical titles.
- A page at Brave rank 1 reaches Claude 89.4% of the time. At rank 10, that falls to 46.1%. At rank 20, it is 4.0%.
- Claude uses straightforward keyword searches. Of its queries, 51.4% start with “best”, 17.4% start with “top”, and 20.9% end with a year.
- Across all 2,290 tool calls, Claude only searched the web. It never followed a link.
- Third-party pages, such as lists, reviews and comparisons, received 59.8% of citations. Only 37.4% of recommended brands had one of their own pages delivered to Claude.
- For 54.4% of the brands Claude recommends, there is no mention in the Brave data for that response. The text of the fetched pages is the only explanation for 21.9% of all recommendations.
Quotes from Ben Wills
These quotes are from the published research post.
“If a page is not in Brave’s web top 10 for the kind of query Claude writes, it effectively does not exist to Claude.”
“Claude is not guessing. It reads the pages and repeats what they say.”
“An unlinked mention counts exactly as much as a linked one.”
Story angles by audience
AI search visibility
In this study, Claude’s web search depended entirely on Brave, which has its own index and webmaster tools. Almost everything came from the web results. Brave’s FAQ, discussion and video sections together added just 5 exclusive URLs out of 21,203 results delivered to Claude.
SEO
The searches are familiar: “best” or “top”, followed by the topic, sometimes a year, and sometimes a word like “reviews”, “comparison” or “rankings”. Age also mattered in the data. Among Brave’s top 5 results, pages older than 24 months reached Claude 74.7% of the time, compared with 86.5% for pages under 6 months old.
Public relations
What other sites say about your brand matters here. Third-party pages received 59.8% of citations, and 63% of recommended brands never had one of their own pages reach Claude. Position within a list also mattered: items in the first 10 positions were recommended between 17.5% and 24.8% of the time. Beyond the tenth position, that fell to 7.6%.
Link building
Claude never followed a link in this test. Look at the recommended brands that appeared neither in Brave’s data nor in the runs without search: 83.7% were named in the page text, and 41.7% had a link. The mention itself reaches the model.
Content marketing
When a page appeared in two or more searches for the same response, Claude cited it 80.5% of the time. When it appeared in one search, that was 48.9%. In this data, covering several related queries gave a page better odds of being cited.
What to keep in mind
- I tested one model, Claude Sonnet 5, with one family of prompts across 100 industries. These citation numbers apply to this test; they do not describe every use of Claude.
- I collected Brave’s results within 24 hours of Claude’s searches. The indexes changed a little in between.
- Anthropic’s help documentation lists Bing as the provider for Claude’s image search. This study looks at web search.
- I could not download 13.4% of result URLs. The page-text checks show both the overall results and the results for responses where every page downloaded.
- The early July 2026 dataset includes 1,100 responses, 2,290 searches, 45,043 matched Brave results, 34,491 downloaded result URLs and 10,538 responses without search.
Interviews
For an interview with Ben Wills, get in touch. You can find his background and the other research in the media kit.