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How Has the Claude Citation Crawler Grown Over Time?

When someone asks Claude a question or uses Claude Code, Anthropic's Claude Citation crawler may visit the cited web pages. This report tracks that crawler's daily share of all tracked AI citation crawler traffic, so you can see exactly how Claude emerged as a citation crawler from December 2025 through April 2026.

Claude Citation Crawler Share of AI Crawler Traffic - April 2026

Claude's daily share of all tracked AI citation crawler traffic from Dec 11, 2025 - Apr 19, 2026, shown as a 7-day rolling average.

Peak daily share

1.73%

on Apr 13, 2026

Latest daily share

1.09%

on Apr 19, 2026

Overall share of period

0.45%

across 130 days

How we collect this data

We collect millions of prompt responses, citations, and click data from the actual user interfaces of major AI platforms — over 4 billion data points and growing. This gives us one of the largest and most authentic datasets on how AI search engines cite sources and recommend brands.

Real UI monitoring

We collect data from the interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews, and more — the same results hundreds of millions of users see daily.

4B+ data points

Our dataset spans over 4 billion analyzed citations, prompts, and responses — giving us one of the largest AI search datasets available.

Aggregated & public

We publish these reports freely so the GEO and AI search community can learn from the data. All reports are based on aggregated, non-identifiable trends.

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