Claude User Agents
Understanding how Anthropic's Claude accesses and indexes web content
Introduction to Claude User Agents
Anthropic's Claude AI assistant uses specific user agents when crawling and accessing web content. Understanding these user agents is crucial for website owners who want to optimize their content for Claude or control how their content is accessed by Anthropic's systems.
Claude User Agent Identification
Claude typically identifies itself with user agents that contain "Claude" or "Anthropic" in the string. Here are the known Claude user agents:
Main Claude User Agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude/1.0; https://claude.ai/)This is the primary user agent used by Claude when browsing the web through its web browsing capability.
How Claude Accesses Web Content
Claude can access web content in several ways:
- Direct user requests - When a user asks Claude to retrieve information from a specific URL
- Background information gathering - When Claude needs to supplement its knowledge
- Training data collection - For improving Claude's capabilities (subject to robots.txt directives)
Controlling Claude's Access to Your Content
Website owners can control how Claude accesses their content through:
Robots.txt Configuration
You can use the following directives in your robots.txt file:
# Block all Claude access
User-agent: Claude
Disallow: /
# Block Claude from specific sections
User-agent: Claude
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members-only/Optimizing Content for Claude
To ensure your content performs well when accessed by Claude:
- Use clear, well-structured HTML with proper semantic markup
- Ensure content is accessible and doesn't rely solely on JavaScript for rendering
- Provide clear context and comprehensive information on topics
- Include metadata that helps Claude understand your content's purpose and authority
Tracking Claude Visits
With xseek, you can track when and how Claude accesses your content:
- Monitor Claude user agent visits in your analytics dashboard
- Track which content Claude is accessing most frequently
- Analyze how Claude interprets and represents your content in responses
Related User Agents
Learn about other AI user agents to better manage your website's interaction with AI systems:
- OpenAI User Agents - ChatGPT, GPTBot, and OAI-SearchBot
- Perplexity User Agents - Perplexity AI search engine
- Deepseek User Agents - Deepseek AI
- Llama User Agents - Meta's Llama AI
- Bing AI User Agents - Bing AI