How to track whether Claude mentions your startup

Claude is used by a growing number of developers, founders and knowledge workers, exactly the people many startups sell to. If they ask Claude "what's the best tool for X?" and you're not in the answer, you've lost a buyer you never knew you had.

The problem is that the usual tools can't tell you.

Why Google Alerts and social listening can't see it

Google Alerts, Mention, Brandwatch and similar tools are good at what they do: they watch websites, news, social media and forums for your brand name. But a Claude answer isn't published anywhere. It's generated in a private chat, for one person, and then it's gone.

So those tools can tell you when someone writes about you. They can't tell you whether Claude recommends you when a buyer asks. For that, you need to ask Claude the questions yourself and read what it says.

What to track

You don't track "mentions" in Claude the way you track mentions on Twitter. You track answers to the questions your buyers ask. For each question, you want to know:

• Are you named? Yes or no.
• Where? First, third, last. Earlier is much better.
• Who's named instead? Your real competitors for that question.
• What's cited? When Claude uses web search, it shows its sources. Those pages explain the answer.
• Is it accurate? Does Claude get your price and features right?

How to check by hand

1. Write 5 to 10 buyer questions. "Best [category] for startups", "[market leader] alternatives", "[category] tool that integrates with [popular tool]". Use the words buyers use. Our guide to choosing buyer questions helps.
2. Open a new chat for each question, with no project or custom instructions that mention your product.
3. Ask each question three times. Claude's answers vary between runs, so one answer isn't enough. See why AI gives different answers each time.
4. Record the results in a table: question, named or not, position, rivals named, sources.
5. Repeat every week or two and compare.

This works, but it's slow. Ten questions, three runs each, every week, is 30 chats a week, and you'll probably want ChatGPT and Gemini too.

Why Claude can answer differently from ChatGPT

Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are trained differently and, when they search the web, often use different sources. In our study of 20 brands, the same brand was regularly named by one engine and missing from the other. So checking ChatGPT alone doesn't tell you what Claude says.

If your buyers are technical, Claude matters even more. Developers and founders are heavy Claude users.

How often to check

How often you check depends on how important the question is:

• Your 5 to 15 most important questions: daily, if you can. Claude's answers vary, and daily checks give you enough answers to see a real trend within a week or two.
• Everything else: weekly is enough to notice changes without drowning in data.
• After a big change like a new pricing page, a launch or a big review: watch closely for the next few weeks to see if it moves the answers.

Don't react to a single answer. A drop from one day to the next is usually noise. A drop that lasts a week is a signal worth looking into.

Which questions to track in Claude

Claude's users skew technical, so think about how they phrase things. Developers and founders tend to ask precise questions with constraints, like "open-source alternative to X that self-hosts", "X with a good API", or "cheapest X for a team of five". Include a few of those alongside the broad "best X" questions. They're often easier to win, because fewer products match the constraints. And if your product has a genuine edge for a specific kind of buyer, write that into a question and track it: those narrow questions are where a small startup can beat a big rival.

How to track it automatically

Citemark puts your buyer questions to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini on a schedule and records every answer. Claude is included on the Pro plan ($49 a month), which also gives you 3 brands and 100 buyer questions, with your 15 most important checked every day.

For each question you see:

• Whether Claude named you, and your position.
• The rivals Claude named instead.
• The pages Claude cited.
• A fact check that flags answers with your price or features wrong.
• Alerts when you drop out of an answer, or a rival enters one.

Every account starts with a 7-day Pro trial, so you can try Claude tracking free for a week, no card needed.

What to do if Claude doesn't mention you

The same things that help with ChatGPT help with Claude:

• Let AI crawlers read your site. Claude's crawler is called ClaudeBot. Check your robots.txt with the AI SEO audit, and read which AI crawlers to allow.
• Say clearly what you do. A homepage that states your category, who it's for and your price in plain words is easier to cite.
• Get onto the pages Claude cites. "Best of" lists, review sites and community threads. See which websites AI assistants cite.
• Publish pages that answer buyer questions directly, like an honest comparison with the market leader.
• Have good documentation. Technical buyers ask Claude "can X do Y?" questions, and clear public docs are often what gets cited in the answer.

The full playbook puts these in order.

Start with a free check

The free AI visibility check asks Claude and ChatGPT 5 buyer questions about your product and shows whether you're named, in about a minute. To track Claude every day, start the 7-day Pro trial.