ANTHROPIC · RESEARCH Aug 13, 2026 · 5 min read

Claude's citations: 64% brand sites, zero Reddit

MK Mara Kovač Editor-in-Chief · 6:00 AM ET 𝕏 in ✉

Editorial illustration: an original document rising through a stack of copies to the top

Every engine has a personality, and Claude's is now measured: it is the one major AI engine where your own website, not Reddit, is the main character. Otterly's June study classified 379,321 Claude citations across 16,406 domains, and the profile it found is so different from ChatGPT's that treating "AI search" as one channel stops making sense the moment you see the numbers.

⚡TL;DR64% of Claude's citations go to brand and product sites, four times its news share. Social media is 0.9%, and Reddit was cited exactly zero times in 379,321 citations. Only 13% of Claude's cited domains overlap with ChatGPT's. Claude is the engine your first-party content can win directly.

Where Claude's citations actually go

Claude citation share by source typeBrand and product sites64.0%News and media14.9%Everything else20.2%Social media0.9%379,321 Claude citations across 16,406 domains, June 2026. Source: Otterly Claude citation study.

Inside that sliver of social, LinkedIn takes 43.1% and Reddit takes nothing at all. A separate cross-engine sample measured Claude's forum citations at roughly 0.1%, and an academic analysis of Claude's health citations found 97.8% pointing at institutional sources such as government bodies, hospitals and professional associations. The pattern is consistent from three independent angles: Claude trusts organizations over crowds.

A different animal from ChatGPT

The overlap numbers are the strategic core of the study: just 13% of Claude's cited domains are also cited by ChatGPT, and at the URL level the overlap falls to 4.2%. Claude also refuses to form a club: its top ten domains account for only 9.5% of citations, and 32.9% of cited domains appear exactly once. Compare that with the cross-engine picture, where a short platform list dominates everything, and you get two channels wearing one label. Optimizing Reddit threads for ChatGPT does nothing here. Publishing reference-grade pages on your own domain does everything.

One more property matters for planning: the mix barely moves. Across the weeks of the study, no source category shifted by more than about a percentage point. What wins Claude citations this month should still win them next month.

What it means for your content

Claude skews toward research, comparison and B2B decision queries, exactly the traffic that converts. And it is the one engine where the work you already control, your product pages, docs, pricing pages and first-party research, is the primary citation pool rather than the long shot. The playbook is the entity-first brief with the third-party layer turned down and the first-party layer turned up: reference-grade pages, evidence in every passage, entities stated cleanly. This week, ask Claude the five buying questions in your category and read what it cites. If your own site is absent from the one engine that prefers brand sites, that is the cheapest gap in AI search to close.

KEY TAKEAWAYS01Brand and product sites take 64% of Claude's citations, four times the news share. First-party content is the main pool, not the long shot.02Social is 0.9% and Reddit was cited zero times in 379,321 citations. ChatGPT tactics do not transfer.03Only 13% of cited domains overlap with ChatGPT, 4.2% at URL level. Track Claude as its own channel.04Citations spread across a huge long tail: the top ten domains hold just 9.5%. Small sites can win here.05The mix is stable week to week, so gains persist. Reference-grade first-party pages are the whole strategy.