Claude-SearchBot
Anthropic · AI search · robots.txt: Yes
Crawls and analyses web content to improve the relevance and accuracy of search results for Claude users.
Block Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /Blocking Claude-SearchBot stops Anthropic indexing your content for search, which Anthropic says may reduce your visibility and accuracy in Claude's search results. It does not decide training use; that is ClaudeBot.
Allow Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block Claude-SearchBot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Facts
- Operator
- Anthropic
- Purpose
- AI search index
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Anthropic says its bots honour robots.txt directives and support the non-standard Crawl-delay extension.
- In your server logs
- Unconfirmed by the operator Anthropic's documentation we checked does not give its user-agent string.
- How to verify it
- Anthropic says a crawler whose source IP address is on its published list is coming from Anthropic.
Published list: claude.com/crawling/bots.json — 26 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 18 Aug 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them.
What Anthropic says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“Claude-SearchBot navigates the web to improve search result quality for users. It analyzes online content specifically to enhance the relevance and accuracy of search responses.”
“Disabling Claude-SearchBot on your site prevents our system from indexing your content for search optimization, which may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results.”
“Anthropic’s Bots respect “do not crawl” signals by honoring industry standard directives in robots.txt.”
“To limit crawling activity, we support the non-standard Crawl-delay extension to robots.txt.”
“If a crawler has a source IP address on this list, it indicates that the crawler is coming from Anthropic.”
Sources
- Claude Help Center: Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler? — fetched and checked 2026-09-22
- Anthropic: crawler IP ranges (bots.json) — fetched and checked 2026-09-22