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How does Claude choose its sources?

Short answer

Claude chooses sources through its web-search tool, which queries an external search backend, fetches the top 5-10 result pages, and passes them to the model with instructions to cite whichever pages informed the answer. Clarity of writing weighs heavier than raw authority in Claude's picker.

Claude does not run its own crawler-indexed corpus. When a user enables browsing, Claude issues a search query, receives back a list of URLs, fetches those pages, and summarises them into an answer with inline citations.

Because Claude's summariser rewrites more than it extracts, page clarity matters more than passage length. A well-structured post with clear headings and a definition block gets picked over a longer, denser post from a higher-authority site.

Structured data helps in a subtle way: Article and FAQPage schema signal that a page is intentionally optimised for machine reading, which correlates with the writing clarity Claude's summariser prefers.

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Frequently asked

Does Claude cite specific passages?›

Claude cites source URLs, not passage anchors. The summary is a paraphrase of the whole fetched page, not a lifted quote.

How do I let Claude access my site?›

Allow ClaudeBot and Claude-Web in robots.txt. Blocking them removes you from Claude's citation pool.

Is Claude's search backend Google?›

Anthropic has not disclosed the specific backend. Behaviour suggests a third-party web-search API, not Google directly.

What content style does Claude prefer?›

Clear prose, short paragraphs, definition blocks, and structured headings. Claude penalises dense unstructured walls of text.

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