Claude and Claude Code behave as distinct answer engines
Profound’s analysis of 24,135 responses collected July 13–23 found Claude searched the web in over 93% of responses versus just 13% for Claude Code, and the two systems’ agents visited different kinds of pages — Claude Code’s agent went mostly to documentation and pricing pages, while Claude’s agent mostly hit robots.txt files, sitemaps, and homepages. The two products also shared only about one in five cited brands, per the research.
Why it matters: For AEO practitioners it means "optimizing for Claude" isn't the same task as optimizing for Claude Code — the two search, cite, and crawl differently enough to need separate strategies.
The record: Anthropic
Glossary: Answer engine
Posted to the wire August 24, 2026.