Claude-SearchBot
Claude-SearchBot is a bot operated by Anthropic that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Claude-SearchBot navigates the web to improve search result quality for users. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Claude-SearchBot can be checked against a published IP range file.
Claude-SearchBot at a glance
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Claude-SearchBot/1.0; [email protected]) |
|---|---|
| Operator | Anthropic |
| Purpose | 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. |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published IP range file Indexes pages so Claude can cite them in search answers. Same published prefix file as the other Anthropic agents. https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | Claude-SearchBot |
| Operator documentation | https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler |
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.
Allow or block Claude-SearchBot
Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking Claude-SearchBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really Claude-SearchBot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Claude-SearchBot precisely because site owners allow it. Indexes pages so Claude can cite them in search answers. Same published prefix file as the other Anthropic agents.
Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.
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