robots.txt rules
Copy the group you need into the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Keep only one option per bot.
At a glance
| Detail | Claude-SearchBot |
|---|---|
| Operator | Anthropic |
| Type | AI search crawler |
| What it does | Crawls the web to improve the quality and relevance of Claude's search results. |
| robots.txt token | Claude-SearchBot |
| Example user agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude-SearchBot/1.0; +Claude-SearchBot@anthropic.com) |
| Follows robots.txt | Anthropic says Claude-SearchBot follows robots.txt. |
| How to verify | Match the user agent and check its behaviour in your logs. |
| If you block it | Claude may find and cite your pages less often, and describe you less accurately. |
| Source | Anthropic help center article on crawlers and robots.txt |
User agent version numbers change over time. Match on the token, not the full string.
What Claude-SearchBot does
Claude-SearchBot indexes pages so Claude can find them when it searches the web. Anthropic says blocking it prevents your content from being indexed for search, which may reduce your visibility and accuracy in Claude's answers.
Should you allow or block it?
Allow it if you want to be visible in Claude.
If you block it: Claude may find and cite your pages less often, and describe you less accurately.
- Training crawlers decide whether your content helps build future models. Blocking them does not remove you from AI search today.
- Search crawlers decide whether AI engines can find and cite your pages. Blocking them usually costs visibility.
- User triggered fetchers read a page because a person asked. Blocking them stops the AI reading you at the moment someone is interested.
How to find Claude-SearchBot in your logs
Search your server or CDN access logs for the token Claude-SearchBot. This command counts visits by IP, path and status code in a standard access log:
grep -i "Claude-SearchBot" access.log | awk '{print $1, $7, $9}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
A run of 403 or 503 status codes means your firewall or bot protection is blocking it, even if robots.txt allows it. That is one of the most common hidden reasons sites lose AI visibility.
How to tell if a visit is genuine
Anyone can put Claude-SearchBot in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Match the user agent and check its behaviour in your logs.
Other Anthropic bots
- ClaudeBot: training crawler. Collects public web content that may be used to train Anthropic's Claude models.
- Claude-User: user triggered fetcher. Fetches a page when a Claude user asks a question that needs it.