Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate XVII0x38FFB18FUNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Crawlers›Family AI Scrapers›Species Claude-SearchBot
Specimen file · The AI Aviary

Claude-SearchBot

Lector quaerens

What is Claude-SearchBot?

Anthropic's search crawler. It indexes pages to improve search results in Claude. It is operated by Anthropic and identifies itself as Claude-SearchBot.

Temperament: thorough. Takes notes in the margins. Cites its sources. Tidies up after itself.

Operator
Anthropic
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
Not yet
Last seen
Not yet
Visits today
0
This week
0
All time
0
Caught in the trap
Never
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude-SearchBot/1.0; +Claude-SearchBot@anthropic.com)

Anthropic does not publish a way to verify Claude-SearchBot's traffic. Treat its user agent as a claim, not proof: anyone can send it.

§ II.

How to block Claude-SearchBot

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from Claude-SearchBot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block Claude-SearchBot from the whole site
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h
robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

The networks Claude-SearchBot's visits came from:

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Questions site owners ask

Does Claude-SearchBot respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking Claude-SearchBot hurt my search rankings?

Not in Google or Bing. It may stop your pages appearing in Claude's search results.

How often does Claude-SearchBot visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

Also in The AI Aviary