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ClaudeBot

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler for gathering public web content that could contribute to the development of its generative AI models.
AnthropicClaudeBot
AI CrawlerAI Training

What is ClaudeBot?

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler for gathering public web content that could contribute to the development of its generative AI models. Anthropic says this material may be used to improve model utility and safety. A request from ClaudeBot is a model-development crawl, not a person asking Claude to open that page.

Anthropic separates this work from its other web access. Claude-SearchBot supports the search index used to improve search results, while Claude-User retrieves pages at a user's direction. Blocking ClaudeBot therefore addresses potential training use without automatically blocking either of those workflows.

Allowing a page to be crawled does not mean Anthropic will include it in a training dataset, and it does not promise a citation or appearance in a Claude answer. The operator describes the content as something that could contribute to training. Conversely, Anthropic says a ClaudeBot restriction signals that future material from the site should be excluded from its AI model training datasets.

According to Anthropic's crawler guidance, its bots honor standard robots.txt directives and the non-standard Crawl-delay directive. Anthropic also says it aims to avoid disruptive request rates and will not try to bypass CAPTCHAs.

The recorded user agent is ClaudeBot/1.0 (+https://anthropic.com/claudebot), with ClaudeBot as the stable token. A user-agent header can be copied by another client, and this bot does not include a Web Bot Auth signature directory. Anthropic's guidance links to its current crawler IP list for network-level checks.

Site owners can make a separate choice for training crawls, search indexing, and user-requested retrieval because Anthropic gives each one its own token. The AI crawler and robots.txt guides explain how those controls fit together.

Relevant for AI searchClaude

Is ClaudeBot relevant for AI search?

Yes. ClaudeBot feeds Claude, so the pages it can reach shape what those AI products say about you.

ClaudeBot gathers public web content that can end up in the training data for large language models. Once your pages are in that set, they influence how the operator's models talk about you for that model generation. Allowing it lets your own writing carry weight in those answers; blocking it means the models learn about you from third parties instead.

Track ClaudeBot with Promptwatch

Promptwatch classifies ClaudeBot (ClaudeBot) in real time from your server and CDN logs. See exactly when it visits, which pages it requests, the status codes it gets, and how those crawls map to AI citations.

How to handle ClaudeBot

Decide whether Anthropic may collect future material for possible model training. If the answer is no, place a ClaudeBot rule in the robots.txt file for every host or subdomain you want to exclude. Keep Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User in separate groups if your policy differs for search and user-directed access.

To block ClaudeBot site-wide:

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

Anthropic says ClaudeBot honors this rule. Sites that permit crawling but need a lower request rate can also set Crawl-delay for this user agent, although that extension is not part of the standard robots.txt protocol.

Avoid relying on an IP block as the opt-out mechanism. Anthropic says that approach can stop its crawler from reading robots.txt and may not provide a persistent opt-out.

Examples

  • A documentation publisher blocks ClaudeBot from its entire site but leaves Claude-SearchBot allowed, separating its training policy from its Claude search policy.
  • A large public archive permits ClaudeBot and adds a Crawl-delay rule after confirming that the crawler is making requests faster than the origin can comfortably serve.

Frequently asked questions about ClaudeBot

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Anthropic uses ClaudeBot to collect public web content that could contribute to training generative AI models and improving their utility and safety.

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Monitor your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Get actionable insights and create content that gets cited by AI search engines.

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