• by Laurie Sullivan , 2 hours ago

Anthropic, the startup behind Claude, took aim at rival OpenAI in its first Super Bowl ad, showing how its AI chatbot can help personalize responses to queries without being a billboard for ads.

“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” according to the YouTube video posted Wednesday.

The Super Bowl XL campaign, “Keep thinking,” mocks product placements. It argues AI should be a "thinking partner" that helps users solve complex problems, rather than a tool to outsource thought or a platform for "sponsored answers."

Anthropic wants to position itself as a different choice. It began last September using the slogan “Keep Thinking” and positioning Claude as a partner to solve complex problems. It may not want to show ads, but it does want user data.

“Being genuinely helpful is one of the core principles of Claude’s Constitution, the document that describes our vision for Claude’s character and guides how we train the model,” the company wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. “An advertising-based business model would introduce incentives that could work against this principle.”

But that doesn’t mean Anthropic won’t interact with commerce. It will.

“We’re particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce, where Claude acts on a user’s behalf to handle a purchase or booking end to end. And we’ll continue to build features that enable our users to find, compare, or buy products, connect with businesses, and more—when they choose to do so,” according to the post.

Now Anthropic is looking for a search engine optimization expert to lead its marketing team.

Since SEO will support commerce, the company today put a call out for an expert on LinkedIn, focused on organic strategy across Anthropic and Claude properties.

As Claude, its AI bot, expands into a direct to consumer and enterprise product, Anthropic needs to ensure claude.ai, its Developer Documentation, and marketing pages are easily discovered on traditional search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing.

The LinkedIn post described a person to help define how Anthropic surfaces in results as AI reinvents search.

Anthropic must reach users who search for AI tools, safety research, and developer guides, but also optimize documentation so developers can find specific API calls or guides for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems.

The SEO lead also will work to optimize their web properties that are built for AI agentic agents like OpenAI’s Operator and Google's Mariner to navigate through the web.

Anthropic considers MCP a new form of technical SEO because it shifts the focus from optimizing websites for human clicks to optimizing data for AI agent "handshakes." 

There have been many reports on how MCP functions as SEO. While traditional SEO uses JSON-LD to explain content to search engines. MCP uses a similar standardized JSON format so that an AI agent knows exactly what input it needs and what outputs it will get back. It acts as a product ID.

Anthropic found that improving tool descriptions in an MCP server can decrease task failure by 40%, and improve ranking, making it likely that an agent will choose the brand’s tool or product over a competitor's.

A blog post published in November 2025 by Anthropic explains how code execution can enable agents to interact with MCP servers more efficiently.