Claude Is the Fastest-Growing AI Search Source. Here Is How to Get Found in It.

If you want to know where your next customers will find you, watch where they are starting their searches. A growing share of them are no longer typing into Google at all. They are asking an AI assistant, and one of those assistants is growing faster than any other.

On 10 June 2026, Search Engine Journal reported figures from SE Ranking showing that Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, was the fastest-growing source of AI referral traffic to websites between January and April this year, with its share rising almost four-fold over the period. It is still the smallest of the major AI traffic sources, well behind ChatGPT, so this is an early signal rather than a flood. But early is exactly when it pays to pay attention.

The more useful finding came two days later. On 12 June, Search Engine Land covered analysis shared by Jonathan Clark of Moving Traffic Media, drawn from a session run by the AI-visibility firm Profound. It suggested Claude behaves unlike its rivals in a way that hands small businesses a rare, practical opening: Claude is, in their words, one of the most optimisable AI answer engines out there.

First, a quick word on what GEO means

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the new sibling of search engine optimisation. SEO is the work of showing up in Google's blue links. GEO is the work of showing up inside the answers that AI assistants give when someone asks them a question. We have written a fuller guide to AI search visibility if you want the full picture, but the short version is this: when a customer asks ChatGPT or Claude for the best option in your field, GEO is what decides whether your business is named in the reply.

Why Claude is the one you can actually plan for

Most AI assistants take a set of search results and then re-rank them with their own opaque logic, so being visible inside them can feel like guesswork. The research on Claude suggests it does much less of this reshuffling. Anthropic's assistant draws its web results from Brave Search, an independent search engine with its own index, and according to the analysis it tends to use Brave's top ten results largely as they are rather than reordering them heavily.

That single difference is what makes Claude plannable. If your business ranks in the top handful of Brave's results for the searches your customers make, you are far more likely to be a source Claude pulls from when it answers. The connection between where you rank and whether you get recommended is direct and observable, which is rarely true of AI search.

There is a second quirk worth knowing. The same analysis found Claude only runs a live web search for a minority of prompts, roughly a third, where ChatGPT searches the web for the large majority of them. So when Claude does decide to search, it is leaning on a smaller, more concentrated set of sources. There is less room in the answer, which means the gap between ranking well and ranking poorly matters more, not less.

For once, an AI assistant is not a black box. With Claude, the path from a good search ranking to a recommendation is short enough to actually walk.

What this means for an Australian small business

It means a search engine you have probably never optimised for, Brave, now quietly influences whether one of the fastest-growing AI assistants recommends you. The good news is that you do not need a separate playbook for it. Brave rewards the same fundamentals that good SEO always has, so the work compounds across Google, Brave, and the AI tools that sit on top of them. Here is where to start.

• Check where you stand on Brave today. Go to search.brave.com and search the exact phrases a customer would use to find a business like yours, including your town or suburb. If you are nowhere near the first page, that is your starting line, and it is the same content and authority work that lifts you on Google.
• Answer the questions Claude is most likely to search. The analysis found AI assistants reach for live search most on recency, comparison, and best-in-category prompts. Pages that clearly answer best plumber in your area or product A versus product B are exactly what gets pulled into an answer.
• Make your key facts impossible to misread. AI assistants quote what is plainly stated. Put your services, locations, prices where appropriate, hours, and contact details in clear text on the page, not buried in an image or a PDF.
• Earn mentions from sources these engines already trust. Being cited on reputable local sites, directories, and press does double duty: it lifts your search ranking and gives the AI more reason to treat you as a credible answer.
• Do not abandon Google. The same research found Claude's results still overlap heavily with Google's rankings, so strong Google SEO continues to feed your AI visibility. This is an additional front, not a replacement for the one you know.

None of this is a one-off. AI assistants change how they search and who they cite constantly, and a tactic that works this quarter can shift the next. The businesses that win here are the ones treating AI search visibility as ongoing work, the way they already treat their Google ranking, rather than a box to tick once and forget.

This is the work we do every day at NextAura. We keep watch on exactly these shifts, then build and maintain the SEO and AI search foundations that get Australian businesses named inside the tools their customers are already asking. If you would rather have your visibility in Claude and the rest handled by people who track these changes daily, get in touch and we will carry it while you focus on running the business.