Authority Signals in Claude AI Health Citations: A Descriptive Analysis Using the Authority Signals Framework

This study seeks to determine the authority signals used by Anthropic's Claude AI in its presentation of sources when answering consumer health questions. While there exists a great deal of discourse around the quality of health citations that LLMs produce, there is limited information on the integrity of the sources the citations originate from, and to what extent the sources are, from what health professionals would consider, credible sources. This descriptive cross-sectional study used data from HealthSearchQA, which contains 3,172 consumer health questions curated by Google Research. After exclusions, a final dataset of 3,075 questions yielding 10,038 citations was analyzed. The Authority Signals Framework (Jacques et al., 2026) was applied to examine 10 authority signals across four domains for a disproportionate stratified sample of 542 sources. Established institutional sources accounted for 97.8% of all citations (n = 9,818). Medical Institutions were the most frequently cited organization type (36.5%), followed by Government Resources (31.6%) and Professional Associations (28.4%). Commercial Health Information comprised 2.2% (n = 220). The top 10 organizations accounted for 57.8% of all citations, with Mayo Clinic alone representing 24.7%. Among commercial sources in the focused sample, 86.4% displayed medical review statements, 82.5% used schema markup, and 71.8% had comprehensive content, while traditional institutional sources appeared in Claude's citations with or without these same markers. As Anthropic positions Claude for HIPAA-ready healthcare applications, these findings establish a baseline for Claude's citation behavior and demonstrate the utility of the Authority Signals Framework as a tool for ongoing, cross-platform evaluation of AI-mediated health information.