CrawlPact

Claude-SearchBot

User-agent token
Claude-SearchBot
Purpose
Search
Status
active
Last verified
2026-07-24

Anthropic documents Claude-SearchBot as a crawler that “navigates the web to improve search result quality for users,” analyzing content specifically to enhance the relevance and accuracy of search responses — distinct from ClaudeBot’s training purpose.

Why the distinction matters

A website that wants to remain discoverable through Claude’s search features while restricting training use of its content needs to treat Claude-SearchBot and ClaudeBot as separate decisions in robots.txt.

Site-owner controls

Anthropic’s own documentation gives this example for blocking any of its crawlers:

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /

See /limitations for what a robots.txt rule can and cannot guarantee.

Example robots.txt configuration

To disallow Claude-SearchBot specifically, without affecting any other crawler:

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /

If no dedicated User-agent: Claude-SearchBot group exists in a domain's robots.txt, this crawler falls back to whatever the wildcard User-agent: * group says (RFC 9309) — see robots.txt syntax basics for how group selection works.

Official source: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler

Verified against the source above as of 2026-07-24 — see how CrawlPact verifies crawler information.

See how this applies to your own site

Run a free audit to check your declared AI crawler policy against your own domain, or use the AI crawler checker to check this one crawler specifically.

Audit a domain

Analytics preferences

CrawlPact uses optional Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity on public marketing pages to understand which content is useful and how visitors actually use it. Neither is used in the authenticated app or admin areas. You can accept or decline analytics without affecting the service.