Back to AI Glossary
Models & Platforms

Claude

Claude is Anthropic's family of large language models and the chat product that exposes them — built around safety-first design, longer context windows, and Constitutional AI alignment.

Why it matters

Claude is one of the four AI assistants serious AEO platforms must measure (alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity). It's a primary target for brands selling into technical, enterprise, or research contexts where Claude has disproportionate share.

What it is

Claude is the consumer-facing chat product and API from Anthropic. It runs on the Claude family of models — Claude Haiku (fast/cheap), Claude Sonnet (balanced), and Claude Opus (highest capability) — with frequent version updates (Claude 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, etc.).

What's distinctive

  • Constitutional AI — Anthropic's alignment approach, where the model is trained against a written constitution rather than purely human feedback.
  • Long context — Claude has historically led on context window size, up to 1 million tokens in extended-context modes.
  • Extended thinking — Claude can pause to reason before answering on complex tasks.
  • Native tool use — supports function calling and Model Context Protocol natively.

Where Claude shows up

Claude appears in claude.ai (consumer chat), claude.com (enterprise), the Anthropic API, and embedded in many third-party products via API. Some search-enabled deployments (including a Brave Search integration on claude.ai) make it an answer engine for live web queries.

Why it matters for AEO

Claude's audience skews technical and enterprise, so brands selling to engineering, research, or knowledge-work buyers often see disproportionate share-of-voice impact from Claude vs ChatGPT. Measuring it separately matters because the same prompt frequently produces materially different brand mentions across the two.

Related terms

Large Language Model(LLM)A neural network trained on massive text corpora that can understand and generate human language, typically with billions of parameters.Generative AI(GenAI)Artificial intelligence that creates new content — text, images, video, audio, or code — by learning patterns from existing data and producing original outputs in response to prompts.Conversational AIAI systems designed to engage in natural language dialogue with humans, ranging from simple chatbots with scripted responses to advanced assistants powered by large language models.Context WindowThe maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) that a language model can consider at once — including both the input prompt and the generated output.Model Context Protocol(MCP)An open standard for connecting AI assistants to external data sources and tools through a unified, composable interface.Answer EngineAn answer engine is an AI system that responds to user questions with synthesised answers rather than a list of links — examples include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot.Answer Engine Optimisation(AEO)Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a brand discoverable, accurately described, and frequently cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

From our blog

Microsoft Is So Worried About Claude Code, They're Testing It Against Copilot
Engineering8 min

Microsoft Is So Worried About Claude Code, They're Testing It Against Copilot

Jan 23, 2026
I Tested 6 AI Research Approaches on the Same Project. Here's What Actually Worked
AI Strategy11 min

I Tested 6 AI Research Approaches on the Same Project. Here's What Actually Worked

Feb 10, 2026