What is Claude-SearchBot?

How often is Claude-SearchBot impersonated?

For the median organisation, over 99% of requests claiming to be Claude-SearchBot failed verification.

Measured between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was 2%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be Claude-SearchBot? Check its IP address.

Should you block Claude-SearchBot?

Allow it if

you want Claude's search to find and cite your pages.

Block it if

you do not want your pages indexed for Claude's search results.

What blocking changes

Anthropic says it stops your content being indexed for search, which may reduce your visibility in Claude's search results.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Anthropic says its bots honor robots.txt and support Crawl-delay.

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Claude-SearchBot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.