Drew Sing

Clerk is absolutely dominating AI search recommendations. ChatGPT, Claude and coding agents love to recommend Clerk. Here's a deep analysis on why they're winning and how you can copy the strategy > Clerk is #1 in AI search for auth. They're mentioned in 64% of answers, more than Auth0, Supabase or Better Auth > AI calls it "the default" and even tells people to use Clerk "unless they have a strong reason not to". Claude says "it's the default for teams that care about time-to-first-working-app". Agents care a lot about time to first value. > Coding agents push Clerk the hardest. Clerk is recommended in 3 of 4 Cursor answers about auth. > The <SignIn /> component is doing a lot of the work. For AI, it's very easy to recommend "Drop in their prebuilt component and get 20+ social providers in 5 minutes". The longer it takes to set your product up, the harder for AI to recommend. Create agent evals for time-to-first-value! > Every answer repeats the same idea. Clerk is fast. It "takes minutes to install", "fastest polished setup", "working auth in minutes". In RL, AI is rewarded for getting to the finished product in as little time as possible. > Clerk's free tier shows up in many answers. Becoming the default recommendation requires two things 1) being the fastest path to success and 2) being the easiest to use for agents. With a free tier, agents have no objection to use your product & onboard themselves. > Clerk's site is well optimized for citations. They serve markdown for accept/markdown headers and set the vary: accept header. They are cited in 42% of answers, way ahead of auth0 at 32%. > Clerk wins top of funnel. They are recommended almost every single time someone asks about "best auth for a small next.js app" or similar framework/small team use case. Being tied closely to React and Next.js works well because so many people ask about that stack. > The AI searches for Clerk without being asked. We analyze the exact search queries AI uses, and 20% of them name "Clerk" directly. E.g. "best authentication provider 2026 auth0 clerk supabase firebase comparison". Being around for some years and getting into model weights is a big help for Clerk. > Clerk's pages turn a search into a win. Auth0's don't. When AI reads a Clerk page to answer, it's the top recommendation 50% of the time. When it reads an Auth0 page, they're the top recommendation in only 10%. Getting cited isn't enough, what the AI reads on your page decides if it recommends you! > Clerk publishes answers that answer buyer questions. They have 135 pages under /articles and those get 38% of all Clerk citations. Some URLs are the question itself like "/articles/how-do-i-implement-social-login-for-my-web-app". Create a knowledge base for the questions people type into AI! > Clerk writes its own comparison pages. Clerk vs. Auth0, vs. Firebase, etc. Auth0 has no cited page that mentions Clerk! If you don't write the comparison, somebody else will, and the AI will use theirs. > Clerk explains its own pricing, so the AIs quote the free tier. They serve the page in markdown to coding agents (so it's easy for agents to read!). That's why "50,000 monthly retained users free" appears in so many answers about pricing. Put a clear, quotable number on your pricing page that AI is gonna like! If you're a devtool, create an eval that measures how agents interact with your product. Tell an agent to set up your product and measure 1) number of type errors 2) time it takes to first success and 3) amount of human input needed (e.g. API key). Optimize toward 0. The agents themselves can tell you what you need to improve. Many small details, e.g. shipping the source code together with your SDK, greatly help agents trying to use your product. All results, AI search queries & numbers from this post are from bydefault.so/state-of-ai-sea… Cheers for reading!