Your roofing company's Google profile is full of good reviews, earned one roof at a time. Then a homeowner in Omaha tells you she asked Claude who should replace her roof, and your name wasn't in the answer.
When we asked Claude questions like hers in October 2026, its answers often quoted a company's Google rating. The links under them went to directories and company websites, not to Google.
Does Claude use Google search?
Anthropic doesn't say it does. Its help page says Claude searches the live web when a question benefits from current information, and every response includes citations.[1]
Anthropic also publishes a list of the outside companies that handle parts of its service. For web search, it names three: Brave Search, TurboPuffer and Parallel Web Systems. Google appears on that list only as Google Cloud Platform, for cloud infrastructure.[2]
The help page adds that image search is powered by Bing. It doesn't name who provides the text search.[1] So Anthropic names no Google service for Claude's web search.
This post sticks to Claude. For ChatGPT and Google's own AI answers, start with our guide to AI search for home service companies.
Does Claude ever put "Google" in its searches?
Almost never, in our data. In October 2026 we asked Claude nine buyer questions about six home service trades in four US metros, outside the Claude app: 864 answers. Claude searched the web in all 864, running 1,741 searches.
Google came up in 1 of those 1,741 searches and Yelp in none, while Houzz came up in 12 and Angi or HomeAdvisor in 11. Nearly every search named the city, and most added a word about reputation: "reviews" went into 721 searches, "best" into 703 and "BBB" into 220.
Every page Claude cited had come back from one of its own searches. Asked the same question again, the words changed more than the pages they found. Across 648 pairs of answers, the searches overlapped by a median of 0.33 and the pages by 0.64, where 1 means identical.
That makes the pages a search turns up for your trade and city worth checking, whichever words Claude picks. The counts are in what Claude searches for when you ask for a contractor.
If not Google, where do Claude's links go?
To directories, review platforms, "best of" list pages and the companies' own websites. Those 864 answers carried 6,472 links to sources (citations), and not one went to a Google page, Maps and Business Profiles included. A wider count, 12,740 citations in 1,944 answers, found no Maps or Business Profile page either.
At least 2,368 of the 6,472 went to directories and platforms such as Yelp, Angi, Houzz and BBB. Another 1,928 went to the websites of companies the answers named. In a separate check of 88 companies Claude named often, its web searches for their profiles brought back no Google Business Profile page.
Those are the pages to keep current: your directory profiles and your own website.
Then where do the Google ratings in Claude's answers come from?
Often the answer doesn't say. Claude's text gave a company's Google rating or number of Google reviews in 350 of the 864 answers, and none of them linked to Google.
Of 601 sentences with a Google rating, 163 said they read it on a directory or list page, and 75 on the company's own site. The other 363 didn't say where the number came from.
Of the review sites we counted, Google was the only one Claude's text named that no link cited. It came up in the text of 465 of the 864 answers.
We counted what the text says, not how Claude came to know a rating. The details are in our count of Google ratings in Claude's answers. So check which rating the directories and list pages show for you.
Is your Google Business Profile wasted on Claude?
No. Claude's answers still quote Google ratings, and Google is still where many buyers start. BrightLocal asked consumers where their latest local search began:
61% of consumers started their most recent local search on Google Search or Maps; 75% used more than one channel.
Source: BrightLocal consumer search behavior study · (opens in a new tab)
In a separate study, BrightLocal compared Google Maps with AI answers on local searches:
In BrightLocal's study of 200k+ localized AI searches, Google Maps named a tracked business in 66% of searches; ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews named it in only 32–38%.
Source: BrightLocal local AI visibility study · (opens in a new tab)
Our counts measured where Claude's links go, not how buyers use Google Search and Maps. Those buyers still see your Business Profile. Keep it complete with our 20-minute profile check, and ask every customer for an honest review.
What can you do so Claude's searches find you?
Work on the pages those searches bring back: directories, list pages and your own website. Here's the order I'd go in:
- Search Brave the way a buyer would. Try "best roof replacement companies Omaha" plus your state, then add "reviews", and note each list page, directory and website. Brave Search is on Anthropic's web search list, but its results show the pages a search brings back, not Claude's answer.
- Fix what those pages say about you. Check your rating, phone number and services on each one, and ask for a correction where something is out of date. Our guide to which business listings matter helps you pick where to start.
- Put your Google rating on your own site. Show the rating and number of reviews, with the month you checked, on your homepage or reviews page. Say plainly what you do and where: roof replacement, Omaha.
- Let Claude's search crawlers in. Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce your site's visibility in its users' search results, and blocking Claude-User stops Claude fetching your pages when asked.[3] Our two-minute robots.txt check walks you through it.
- Keep Googlebot welcome, and tell Brave what changed. Brave says its crawler won't crawl a page that Googlebot can't.[4] Its public form asks for "the URL to be re-fetched", so paste in each key page after you update it.[5]
A ten-minute Claude check for a roofer in Omaha
- Three minutes: search Brave for "best roof replacement companies Omaha", then again with "reviews". Write down each list page, directory and company website on the first page.
- Three minutes: open the directory profiles you're on. Check the rating, the phone number and that roof replacement is listed as a service.
- Two minutes: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User and any "Disallow: /" line.
- Two minutes: read your homepage. It should say roof replacement, Omaha, and your Google rating with the month you checked.
Illustrative example
What not to do
- Don't let the Google profile slide. Claude may link elsewhere, but its text still quotes Google ratings, and buyers on Google Search and Maps still see the profile.
- Don't block every AI crawler at once. Training is a separate switch: Anthropic says ClaudeBot collects web content that could be used for training.[3]
- Don't chase the exact search words. Claude's searches changed between asks more than the pages they found, so put the time into the pages.
The rest, from your homepage to the profiles Claude finds, is in how to get recommended by Claude.
When is it worth handing this off?
When the check turns up more fixes than you have evenings for. On our AI search optimization plans, every month we run the same buyer questions across the AI assistants we test (currently ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity). Then we fix the website, listings and Google profile those answers draw on, the same foundation local SEO is built on.
Before you hand anything off, the Expert Action Plan ($149) gives you the complete report plus a 30-minute consultation. Roofers can also start with our roofing SEO page.
What Anthropic doesn't publish
Anthropic names three companies for Claude's web search, but the pages we read don't say what each one does or how Claude ranks the results. The list can change, too: we read it on November 1, 2026.
Our counts come from October 2026, in four US metros and six home service trades, and Claude's search changes over time. We asked outside the Claude app, and the app can answer differently: it may know where you are and remember earlier chats. Anthropic's help page says Claude may use your location, inferred from your IP address, for local results.[1]
So ask more than once, on different days, before you act on what Claude says. How we ran the study lists the questions and the checks behind our numbers.