Claude's web search finds pages through Brave, and Brave skips any page Googlebot cannot crawl, so our site check needs the Googlebot row for the Claude column as well as Google's.

The favicon guidelines now say Googlebot must be able to crawl the home page and "follow any redirects from there to the page where the favicon is specified", and that "These URLs must not be blocked from crawling by a robots.txt file or by other means." The doc covers organic search results only and does not mention AI Overviews or AI Mode. John Mueller told Search Engine Roundtable the rewrite was made because "AI systems didn't understand exactly how to investigate this."

ChatGPT's newest entry (27 October) adds iCloud Mail and Calendar plugins, nothing on search or citations. Google's changelog newest entry is still the 26 October spam guide. Perplexity's changelog is unchanged with no current Sonar model deprecated. Anthropic posted on drug development and a US government partnership (27 October), nothing on search; the deprecations table is unchanged (Sonnet 4.5 retires 30 November, Haiku 4.5 Active with no notice). Bing's newest webmaster post is still 13 October. Cloudflare's newest posts are a PHP challenge and a Q3 outage summary.

Method in one clause: 1,000 prompts compared against Brave results (8,500 URLs), then 734 fetched pages and 1,568 quoted sentences from Claude API responses used to test which passage-picking method best matches Claude's real choices. Figures: Claude's results covered by Brave at "89.1% across the top 20 results"; Claude used about 1,900 characters of a typical 14,600-character page; plain keyword matching (BM25) picked the right passage 41.6% of the time, against 21.9% for random and 34.1% for always taking the top of the page. The authors say the findings are "not officially confirmed by Anthropic", and that a retrieved passage can still go uncited. Peec sells an AI visibility tracker, the prompts are not described by sector, and no small businesses are named.

The Brave link has outside support. Anthropic's subprocessor list added Brave Search on 19 March 2025 (Simon Willison, 21 March 2025, OLDER, matched Claude's citations to Brave's results for one query), and Xponent21 (Isaac Marcuson, 2 July 2026, OLDER, read first-hand) reports a second web search provider, turbopuffer, added 6 May 2026, with its role not public. The subprocessor list itself was not read today. Brave's crawler help page (undated, read first-hand) says that if Googlebot cannot crawl a page, "Brave Search's bot will not crawl it either", and that its crawler has no separate user agent.

Method in one clause: about one million sampled messages a month from adult Free, Go, Plus and Pro accounts, July 2024 to September 2026, sorted by an automated classifier. Information seeking was 16.7% in July 2024, 20.7% in August 2026 and 20.2% in September 2026; practical guidance was the largest topic at 28.1%. Information seeking lumps together facts, "questions about products and services for sale" and recipes, with no split. Signals says nothing about how often ChatGPT searched the web or cited a site, and figures change between versions.