How Claude finds your business (and why Brave Search matters)

Imagine a customer in Vancouver opens Claude and asks “best awnings installer in Vancouver?” Claude pauses, runs a web search in the background, reads what it finds, and writes an answer. The question worth knowing: which search engine did Claude just query? If it was not Google, and not Bing, and your business is not in the answer, you might be in the wrong index.

Anthropic, the company that builds Claude, has never put out a press release naming the search engine behind Claude’s web search. They also have not had to. The evidence is in their own published documents, and it points clearly at one source: Brave Search.

This article walks through what the public record actually shows, what it does not show, and what a Vancouver business owner should do about it. Plain language. Primary sources. No speculation passed off as fact.

What Anthropic actually says

Anthropic publishes a Trust Center subprocessor list. Subprocessors are third-party companies Anthropic shares customer data with in order to deliver a service. On March 19, 2025, Anthropic added one new entry to that list: Brave Search. The entry is linked directly to Anthropic’s own support article about enabling and using web search in Claude.

One day later, on March 20, 2025, Anthropic announced that Claude could now search the web. The launch post does not name a search backend. The API documentation about Claude’s web search tool also does not name a backend for text search. It does mention one thing: “Image search is powered by Bing.” Text search is mentioned without a vendor. The only place a search engine appears next to web search in Anthropic’s public materials is the Trust Center, and that one entry is Brave.

What independent testing shows

Within 24 hours of Anthropic’s web search launch, the developer Simon Willison opened up the Claude tool definition and found an internal parameter named BraveSearchParams. Tool parameters in an AI assistant’s schema describe how the assistant talks to an external service. Naming a parameter after a vendor strongly suggests that vendor is the one being called.

Researchers and journalists then ran the same queries through Claude and through Brave Search and compared results. The citation overlap between Claude’s answers and Brave’s top organic results came back at roughly 87 percent. That is not coincidence. That is the same index showing through both products.

On the Brave side, in a February 24, 2026 blog post, Brave wrote that their Search API now “supplies most of the top-10 LLMs” and that “for some of those LLMs Brave is the only search engine index supporting their AI answers.” Anthropic is plainly in the top-10. Brave does not name Anthropic, but the math is hard to argue with.

Anthropic listed Brave Search as a subprocessor for Claude. Claude’s internal code references a BraveSearchParams object. Claude’s citations match Brave’s top results 87 percent of the time. None of that is a coincidence.

What this does NOT mean

A careful reader of the evidence above will notice what is missing. So we need to be honest about it.

• ·Anthropic has not confirmed it on the record. No press release. No quoted statement. No joint announcement with Brave. If Anthropic switches backends tomorrow, they are not required to tell anyone.
• ·Brave is not the only thing Claude uses. Anthropic’s docs explicitly say image search is Bing-powered. For text, Claude can also browse pages you paste a URL of, use agentic tools to follow links, and (as of February 2026) apply “dynamic filtering” that re-ranks search results in code before answering.
• ·Being in Brave’s index is necessary, not sufficient. Even if Brave returns your page to Claude, Claude still has to choose to cite it. Authority, structure, freshness, and clarity all matter on top of inclusion.
• ·The arrangement could change. Tech vendor relationships rotate. The right defense is to be in all three of Google’s, Bing’s, and Brave’s indexes, not to bet on one.

What this means for a Vancouver business

Strip out the hedge and the practical conclusion is simple. If your business does not appear in Brave Search, your odds of appearing in Claude’s answers are low. Brave is the smallest of the four indexes that matter (Google, Bing, Brave, plus the long tail), and the hardest to get into, because Brave does not have a Webmaster Tools. There is no dashboard. There is no sitemap upload. There is no ranking report.

What Brave does have is one official lever: search.brave.com/submit-url. It is a form. You paste one URL at a time. That is the entire interface.

For most Vancouver businesses we have looked at, the reason they are not in Claude is not that their site is bad. It is that nobody ever told Brave they existed. They are in Google. They are in Bing (because Bing crawled them on its own). They are not in Brave, because Brave’s crawler (Bravebot) operates on a reciprocal-with-Googlebot rule and has not gotten to them yet, and no human has ever submitted their URLs.

A 90-day plan

Week 1: Confirm where you stand

Go to search.brave.com and run site:yourdomain.com. If you see five or fewer pages, you are functionally invisible in Brave. If you see zero, you are completely outside the index. Either way, the next step is the same.

Week 1-2: Submit your top URLs by hand

Visit search.brave.com/submit-url. Submit, one at a time:

• ·Your homepage
• ·Each main service page
• ·Your contact page
• ·Your top 3 to 5 case study or testimonial pages
• ·Any pages you genuinely want to rank for a specific search query

For most local businesses this is 8 to 12 submissions. It takes 15 minutes.

Week 3-4: Verify Bravebot can reach you

Open your robots.txt (at yourdomain.com/robots.txt). If it blocks Googlebot, it almost certainly also blocks Bravebot, because Brave applies a reciprocal rule: if you do not let Google in, they do not crawl either. Either explicitly allow Bravebot, or just allow Googlebot. Most sites already do.

Month 2: Test Claude directly

Open Claude (claude.ai or the mobile app, free or paid plan works). Ask: “What is [your business name]?” Then: “Best [your service] in Vancouver?” Then: “Who installs [your specific product] in [your neighbourhood]?” If Claude cites you, the loop is closed. If Claude says it cannot find you, you still need more time, or more inclusion work.

Month 3: Re-run the site: check and submit anything new

Repeat the Brave site: check. The number should be higher. Submit any new pages you have published in the meantime. Then leave it alone. Brave indexing is slower than Google by about 30 to 60 days. Patience matters.

The bottom line

Anthropic has never officially confirmed that Claude’s web search runs on Brave. They have published a legal disclosure in their Trust Center naming Brave Search as a subprocessor. Their tool internals refer to BraveSearchParams. Independent testing shows Claude’s citations match Brave’s top results around 87 percent of the time. Brave itself confirms (without naming names) that it supplies most of the top-10 LLMs.

For a Vancouver business owner this is enough evidence to act on. Submit your URLs to Brave. Verify Bravebot can reach you. Test Claude directly. Diversify into Google, Bing, and Brave so no single change at any vendor wipes you off the AI map.