I’ve discovered something intriguing about Claude’s reliance on Brave Search rankings. Based on insights shared by Jonathan Clark during a Profound session on Zero Click, it seems that Claude frequently taps into Brave’s search results, particularly when dealing with recency, ranking, or comparison prompts.
Clark, who is the managing partner at Moving Traffic Media, emphasized a key point from the session: Claude doesn’t rearrange search results but instead incorporates Brave’s top 10 search results directly into its answers.
Claude’s web searches are selective. In fact, I learned that Claude uses web search in only 36.6% of cases compared to about 90% for ChatGPT, as per Clark’s observation.
Claude is triggered to search most often by prompts that signal current trends, rankings, location, or comparisons. For example, queries like “best XYZ” caused a search 81% of the time. Ranking focus prompts had a search rate of 67%.
Location prompts initiated searches 55% of the time, while comparison prompts such as “X vs. Y” led to searches 51% of the time.
Brave rankings are crucial. Another interesting point is that Claude’s answers only matched ChatGPT’s citations in 8% of cases for the same queries, according to Clark.
Claude’s results showed a 64% overlap with Google rankings. This indicates that Google-focused SEO strategies might be more effective for Claude than efforts targeted at boosting visibility in ChatGPT.
The analysis also highlights the significance of tracking Brave search rankings. Clark mentioned that Claude relies on Brave, and achieving good rankings in Brave provides us with measurable insights.
Memory in prompts. I found it interesting that prompts like “how does,” “what is,” and “steps to” are less likely to prompt Claude to conduct a web search. Without searching, Claude cannot cite online sources.
According to Clark, Claude searches most often for prompts with keywords like “best,” “top,” or comparative phrases.
The pattern of years in queries. Clark noted that there are consistent patterns that might simplify testing with Claude:
One noticeable trait is Claude’s query fan-outs, which consistently produced the same results 65% of the time across users.
These fan-outs frequently involve years, suggesting that titles featuring the current year might be advantageous in Claude-initiated searches, especially for queries driven by ranking and recency.
Why this matters to us. It appears that Claude’s visibility hinges more on the rankings within the search results it utilizes. Clark suggests Claude might be one of the most amendable AI answer engines due to its consistent search patterns closely tied to measurable rankings.
Inspired by this post on Search Engine Land.
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