ClaudeBot user agent
Operated by Anthropic
ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler that collects public web content which may be used to train Claude models.
The ClaudeBot bot at a glance
- ClaudeBot is operated by Anthropic and collects public web pages that may be used to train AI models.
- The robots.txt token for ClaudeBot is ClaudeBot.
- Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- ClaudeBot robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is ClaudeBot?
ClaudeBot gathers public pages that could contribute to training Anthropic’s Claude models. Anthropic states that a ClaudeBot block signals that a site’s future content should be excluded from training data.
ClaudeBot is separate from Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, so blocking it does not stop Claude from searching or reading a page for a user.
Should you block ClaudeBot?
Blocking ClaudeBot is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow ClaudeBot
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token ClaudeBot is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block ClaudeBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow ClaudeBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep ClaudeBot out of private areas only
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to ClaudeBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(ClaudeBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to ClaudeBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (ClaudeBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "ClaudeBot")How to verify real ClaudeBot traffic
Anthropic publishes the IP ranges that ClaudeBot uses. A request with the ClaudeBot user agent from an IP outside that list is an impersonator.
How to find ClaudeBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts ClaudeBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "ClaudeBot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
ClaudeBot FAQ
ClaudeBot uses the robots.txt token "ClaudeBot". Anthropic does not publish a full user-agent string, so match the token inside the User-Agent header.
Yes. Anthropic states that ClaudeBot follows robots.txt rules written for the "ClaudeBot" token.
Blocking an AI training crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking keeps your future pages out of that company's training data, so its models may know less about your brand over time. It does not remove you from that company's AI search, which uses a separate bot.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: ClaudeBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Yes. Anthropic publishes the IP ranges ClaudeBot uses. Check the request IP against that list; a matching user agent from any other IP is an impersonator.
Search your server access log for "ClaudeBot", for example with: grep -i "ClaudeBot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Anthropic crawler documentation. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
