Claude-SearchBot allowed
What it checks
Reads the robots.txt rules that apply to Claude-SearchBot — its own group if it has one, otherwise the catch-all — and reports whether they let it fetch the site root. A named group is not required: under RFC 9309 §2.2.1 an open catch-all grants the same access.
Why it matters
Disallowing Claude-SearchBot removes the site from the index Anthropic uses to improve Claude’s search result quality, reducing the chance of being surfaced/cited in Claude search answers.
Evidence
Claude-SearchBot allow/block state in robots.txt
Documented by Anthropic: Claude-SearchBot ‘navigates the web to improve search result quality for users. It analyzes online content specifically to enhance the relevance and accuracy of search responses’, covered by the same robots.txt-compliance statement and the claude.com/crawling/bots.json IP list. As a search/citation-side agent it is the Anthropic analogue of OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, so an allow is the visibility-positive state.
Limits
Anthropic does not state the consequence of blocking as explicitly as OpenAI does for OAI-SearchBot (‘will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers’) — the exclusion-from-answers link is inferred from the agent’s stated purpose, not asserted. No published per-bot citation-impact study isolates Claude-SearchBot.
How it scores
Anthropic names the token and its purpose — it “analyzes online content specifically to enhance the relevance and accuracy of search responses” — under the same robots.txt-compliance statement and IP list that cover its other bots. That is a named agent reading a named directive, which is grade A. The exclusion-from-answers consequence is inferred from the stated purpose rather than asserted the way OpenAI asserts it for OAI-SearchBot, which is why the audit’s copy states the purpose and not a promise.
Sources
- RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol — IETF, spec (verified 2026-08-21)
- Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler? — Anthropic, vendor-doc (verified 2026-10-19)