AI crawler · Anthropic · AI search index

Claude-SearchBot: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it

Claude-SearchBot is Anthropic's AI search crawler. Crawls the web to improve the search results Claude gives its users. In our 13 October 2026 study, 165 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (7.1%) disallow Claude-SearchBot. Part of the AI crawler list.

What Claude-SearchBot does

Operator: Anthropic. Job: AI search index. Obeys robots.txt.

“Anthropic’s Bots respect “do not crawl” signals by honoring industry standard directives in robots.txt.”

Anthropic's Claude-SearchBot documentation Published IP ranges (JSON)

Claude-SearchBot user agent

robots.txt token: Claude-SearchBot (matched case-insensitively).

Anthropic doesn't publish a full user-agent string for Claude-SearchBot. Look for Claude-SearchBot in the User-Agent header.

robots.txt: allow or block Claude-SearchBot

Allow

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

Block

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Affects AI answers and citations. Blocking it keeps your pages out of the index Anthropic's AI search answers cite. It is not a training crawler.

Once a group names Claude-SearchBot, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.

How many top sites block Claude-SearchBot

Disallow Claude-SearchBot in robots.txt

7.1%

165 of 2,332 sites

Allowed by robots.txt, refused at the firewall

7.4%

196 of 2,656 sites

In our 13 October 2026 study, 165 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (7.1%) disallow Claude-SearchBot. Of the 2,656 listed sites whose robots.txt allowed Claude-SearchBot and that answered a browser cleanly, 196 (7.4%) refused our Claude-SearchBot request at the firewall with an error or challenge page.

Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Firewall tests came from our server, not the crawler's published IP ranges, so a refusal can also be an edge that verifies crawlers by IP. Method and CSV in the study.

Check your own site

The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way Claude-SearchBot does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.

Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in

What it checks

robots.txt for Claude-SearchBot: Finds the group Claude-SearchBot obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
What your CDN lets through: Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
Content without JavaScript: AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.

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Questions

What is Claude-SearchBot?+

Claude-SearchBot is Anthropic's AI search crawler. Crawls the web to improve the search results Claude gives its users.

What is Claude-SearchBot's user agent?+

Anthropic publishes only the token Claude-SearchBot. Match on it in the User-Agent header.

How do I block Claude-SearchBot?+

Add "User-agent: Claude-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per Anthropic.

Does blocking Claude-SearchBot affect AI search citations?+

Blocking it keeps your pages out of the index Anthropic's AI search answers cite. It is not a training crawler.

How many websites block Claude-SearchBot?+