Microsoft Copilot and Claude: What businesses should know about these AI assistants

Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is integrated into Windows, the Edge browser, Microsoft 365 and Bing Search, and therefore reaches many users in a professional context. For up-to-date information, Copilot draws on the Bing index.

• Register your website in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap – the easiest way is to import it from Google Search Console.
• Keep an eye on the “AI Performance” report (beta) in Bing Webmaster Tools, which provides data on visibility in Microsoft's AI answers.
• Use IndexNow so that Bing picks up changes faster.
• Do not block Bingbot, and make sure content is clean and rendered server-side.

Claude by Anthropic

Claude is increasingly used for research and within companies, and can retrieve information via a web search. Anthropic distinguishes between crawlers for model training, for search and for fetches triggered directly by users. Website owners can control these separately in robots.txt.

If you want to appear as a source in Claude's answers, you should allow the search crawler. Whether content is additionally made available for training is a strategic decision that we discuss with clients in the GEO Audit.

What applies to all AI assistants

1. Content that answers specific questions in the first sentence.
2. A clear, consistent description of the brand across the web – see Entity Optimization.
3. Mentions in specialist portals, comparisons and directories in your own industry.
4. Regular measurement using a fixed prompt catalogue – see AI Visibility.