You will find plenty of blog posts confidently telling you how to rank in Claude, complete with percentages. Almost all of them are making it up. This is the post that tells you the truth instead, which turns out to be more useful, because it points you at the one thing you can actually control.
Does Claude recommend local contractors at all?
The honest answer is that nobody has rigorously measured this. Unlike ChatGPT with its home-services integrations or Gemini sitting inside Google's local ecosystem, Claude has no Maps integration and no local-business surface. It is a general-purpose assistant. When someone asks it for a contractor, it can use its web search tool to look, but there is no published, credible study of how often it names specific local businesses or which ones. Anyone who hands you a Claude recommendation rate for your trade is quoting a number that does not exist.
How much traffic does Claude even send?
A small slice today. Similarweb-family data puts Claude at 2.62% of AI referral traffic, behind ChatGPT at 74.78%, Gemini at 11.56%, Perplexity at 7.23%, and Copilot at 3.51%. That does not mean Claude is unimportant. It has a devoted professional user base and it is growing. It means that as a channel for a local contractor chasing homeowners, it sits well behind the big two, and your effort ranks accordingly.
Is there anything real I can actually do for Claude?
Yes, and it is concrete: check your robots.txt. Anthropic runs its web search tool with inline citations, and it operates three distinct crawlers, each with a different job. ClaudeBot gathers training data. Claude-SearchBot builds the search index Claude reaches when it looks something up. Claude-User fetches pages live when a user's question sends it to your site. Your robots.txt file decides whether those crawlers are allowed to read your content at all. If you have blocked them, Claude cannot use your site as a source no matter how good your pages are. That one file is the difference between eligible and invisible.
- Open your robots.txt and confirm you are not blocking Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User, the crawlers that let Claude find and fetch your pages.
- Decide deliberately about ClaudeBot, the training-data crawler; allowing or blocking it is a business choice, but know which you have made.
- Publish the same priced, specific, verifiable pages that win every other engine, since a web-search answer still needs a real source to cite.
- Do not pay anyone for Claude-specific optimization built on citation numbers. Those numbers are not real yet.
2.62%
Claude share of AI referral traffic (Similarweb)
74.78%
ChatGPT share of AI referral traffic (Similarweb)
11.56%
Gemini share of AI referral traffic (Similarweb)
3
Anthropic crawlers your robots.txt governs
The broader point holds across every engine, not just Claude. 5W Public Relations, a PR agency that sells AI-visibility services, ran a prompt probe in early 2026 and reported that roughly 87% of independent HVAC and plumbing contractors had effectively no AI citation share in their own metro across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Take the exact figure with a grain of salt given the source and method, but the shape is familiar: most contractors are invisible to AI, and the ones who are not got there on purpose.
