What is Claude, and do customers use it to find businesses?
Anthropic describes Claude as “a helpful, intuitive, and powerful collaborator” you can put to work on real tasks. Anthropic lists searching the web for current information among Claude’s tools, and says Claude runs on the web, on phones and in a desktop app. In Pew Research Center’s February 2026 survey, 6% of U.S. adults said they ever use it, well behind ChatGPT at 44%.
What Anthropic says Claude is
Anthropic’s FAQ calls Claude “a helpful, intuitive, and powerful collaborator” that you can put to work on real tasks, not just questions. You give it a goal in plain language and point it to the files and tools it may use, and it can produce files such as documents, spreadsheets and slides for you to review and edit.
Anthropic’s page is written around work. Its examples are grouped by roles, including Marketing, Sales, Finance, Human resources, Legal and Product.
Anthropic says Claude runs on the web and on phones (iOS and Android), has a desktop app for macOS and Windows, and also works inside other apps, including Slack (in beta for Team and Enterprise plans) and Microsoft 365 apps.
Can it search the web?
Anthropic’s page lists “The web” among the tools Claude can use, described as “Search the web for current information”. In general, an answer that uses a search can reflect pages as they are now, not only what the model learned earlier.
Do customers use it to find businesses?
Nothing cited here measures how many people use Claude to find a business; Anthropic’s examples are work tasks such as call prep and contract redlines.
In Pew Research Center’s survey of 5,119 U.S. adults, conducted February 17 to 23, 2026, 6% said they ever use Claude. In Pew’s chart it ranks sixth among seven chatbots, behind ChatGPT at 44%, Gemini at 24%, Copilot at 17%, Meta AI at 14% and Grok at 8%, and ahead of Character.ai at 3%. Pew’s text groups Claude with Grok and Character.ai as chatbots that about one in ten adults or fewer say they use.
Pew’s figure counts anyone who ever uses Claude, for any reason, across all U.S. adults. The share among your own customers may be different. The simplest way to find out is to ask every new inquiry how they found you, and record “AI answer” as the source when an assistant was involved.
What it means for a business
Claude is one more place a customer may ask about you. Because it can search the web, keep your own website’s details current; the related answer on whether AI assistants get facts wrong covers what you can change. Add Claude to the monthly check in the related answer on checking what assistants say about your business. No one can promise that Claude will recommend a particular business.
Sources
- Anthropic, “The AI for problem solvers | Claude by Anthropic”
- Pew Research Center, “Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact” (June 17, 2026)
Related answers
- How do you check what ChatGPT says about your business?
- Do AI assistants get facts about businesses wrong?
- How many people use AI assistants like ChatGPT?
GEO: recommended in AI answers
When a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI who to call, the answer names a few businesses. GEO is the work of making yours one of them.