What is Claude-User?
Claude-User is the agent Anthropic uses to fetch a web page when a person asks Claude a question that needs it. Anthropic runs three bots with separate jobs, and Claude-User is the one that acts for a person in a conversation: when a question needs a page, it fetches it. Blocking it means Claude cannot read your page for the people asking about you.
What does Claude-User do?
Anthropic says Claude-User supports Claude AI users: when people ask Claude questions, it may access websites to answer them. Disabling Claude-User on your site prevents Anthropic's system from retrieving your content in response to a user query, which Anthropic says may reduce your site's visibility in user-directed web search (Anthropic, April 7, 2026).
How is Claude-User different from ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot?
Each of Anthropic's bots answers a different question in robots.txt:
| Bot | Job | If you disallow it |
|---|---|---|
| ClaudeBot | Collects content that could contribute to model training | Signals your future content should be left out of training |
| Claude-SearchBot | Indexes content to improve Claude's search results | May reduce your visibility and accuracy in Claude's search answers |
| Claude-User | Fetches a page when a person's question needs it | Claude cannot retrieve your content for that user's query |
How do you allow or verify Claude-User?
Name it in robots.txt; Anthropic says its bots honor robots.txt directives, and a rule applies per host, so add it to every subdomain you want covered. To confirm a request is really Anthropic's, check its source IP against the list Anthropic publishes at claude.com/crawling/bots.json.
# Let Claude read pages for people who ask about you
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /What does this mean in a real example?
In the public Tesla example (Oct 4, 2026), Claude gave 351 citations across 25 buyer questions and named Tesla in 11 answers. Only one citation went to tesla.com; its most cited site was en.wikipedia.org, 16 times.
Those are the pages Claude read for those questions. Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot decide whether your pages can be among them; whether Claude then picks them is measured by asking it the questions.
How do you see Claude-User on your site?
Proofsource counts AI fetcher requests from your Cloudflare zone or access logs, Claude-User included, verified against Anthropic's published IP list, and lines them up with the answers that cite each page. See AI Traffic and how Claude chooses the brands it names.
Common questions about Claude-User
Does blocking Claude-User stop Claude training on my site?
No. Training is ClaudeBot's job. Claude-User only fetches pages for a person's question; blocking it costs visibility, not training data.
Does Claude-User respect robots.txt?
Anthropic says its bots honor robots.txt directives. Add the rule to each subdomain you want covered.
Should I block Anthropic's IP addresses instead?
Anthropic advises against relying on it: blocking IPs may not work correctly or persistently and can stop its bots reading your robots.txt.
What is the full Claude-User user-agent string?
Anthropic's article names the token but does not print a full string. Match the Claude-User token and verify the IP against Anthropic's published list.
Related terms
- ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler that collects web content that could contribute to training Anthropic's Claude models.
- Claude-SearchBot
Claude-SearchBot is Anthropic's crawler that reads the web to improve the quality and relevance of Claude's search results.
- robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, under the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309).
- ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is the agent OpenAI uses when ChatGPT or a custom GPT visits a web page because of something a user asked.
Worked example: Tesla, public AI answers, Oct 4, 2026: Proofsource's first scan of Tesla, 25 buyer questions and 5 brand questions, one answer per question on each of four engines. A small sample from one brand, shown as an example, not a benchmark.
See where AI leaves you out, and what to fix.
See which buyer questions name your brand, who gets named instead, and what to fix. 200 answers. 25 Prompts/Question. Top AI engines. 2 days. Free. No card.
Google AI OverviewsGoogle AI Mode
