Log inSign up
How we work with our AI visibility

Titles & AI Visibility: ask Claude how to file Norwegian taxes, get blogs instead of Skatteetaten

During investigations of why our Norwegian pages disappeared, I found that the same happens to Skatteetaten.

Skatteetaten tells search engines its Norwegian pages have English twins, and Claude's search skips them, just like Brave set to USA. So Claude cites bank and accounting blogs instead of Skatteetaten.

By Gullik Vetvik Killie,

I asked Claude on my phone: “Hvordan leverer jeg skattemeldingen 2026”.

We expected it to find Skatteetaten's own guide, Skattemeldingen: se, endre eller levere. It is the first result on Brave in Norway (picture 3), and it has an English twin.

The Claude app, asked “Hvordan leverer jeg skattemeldingen 2026”, answers in Norwegian and cites asbank, jithomassen, fiken and skriving.
Claude's answer.

The answer looks fine. But the facts come from a bank and accounting blogs, not from Skatteetaten.

Claude’s web search for “skattemeldingen 2026 hvordan levere Skatteetaten”: results from jithomassen, fiken, asbank, zensum, skriving and okonomi, and no Skatteetaten guide.
What Claude searched for, and what it got.

Claude even puts “Skatteetaten” in its own search. The guide is still not in the results.

Claude’s source list: citations from asbank, jithomassen, fiken, skriving and zensum; under More sources, fiken, okonomi and one Skatteetaten news article.
Claude's sources.

Skatteetaten shows up once, at the very bottom: a news article, not the guide, and not cited.

Then I ran Claude's exact search on Brave, the search engine Claude uses, with two different regions.

Brave with the region set to Norway, same search: Skatteetaten’s Norwegian pages at the top.
Brave, region Norway.

With the region set to Norway, Skatteetaten's guide is the first result.

Brave with the region set to USA, same search: Skatteetaten only as the English “Tax Return” page.
Brave, region USA.

Set to USA, Skatteetaten only shows up in English.

Further down the Brave USA results: okonomi.no, jithomassen.no and skriving.no, the same sites in Claude’s sources.
Brave, region USA, further down.

Further down are okonomi, jithomassen and skriving. The same blogs Claude used.

Why

The Skatteetaten page has an English twin. A language tag (hreflang) in the page tells search engines that the two are the same page in two languages:

hreflang="no" → /person/skatt/skattemelding/skattemelding-for-person/
hreflang="en" → /en/person/taxes/tax-return/tax-return-person/

So I think Claude searches Brave with an English locale. Then the Norwegian pages are filtered out and the English ones are shown instead. The English page is a poor match for a Norwegian question, so the blogs win.

We saw the same on our own site. When we removed the language tags between our Norwegian and English pages, 8 of 8 Norwegian pages came back in Claude's search the same day.

Notes

The one Skatteetaten page Claude did find, the news article, has no English version. The page says so itself: “This page is not available in English.”

Skatteetaten's news article “I dag går de første skattemeldingene ut”, with the notice “This page is not available in English.”
No English twin, and the only Skatteetaten page Claude found.

Claude knows where I am. Same app, same incognito chat mode, same morning:

Claude incognito chat, Haiku 4.5: asked for the time, it answers 08:31 on 30 September 2026 in the timezone Europe/Oslo.
Claude says my timezone is Europe/Oslo. Its search still does not look from Norway.

Claude app, Haiku 4.5, incognito chat, location on, no VPN, one try on 30 September 2026. Brave searched with Claude's own query, skattemeldingen 2026 hvordan levere Skatteetaten.

More experiments are under How we work with our AI visibility.