Definition

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler for collecting web content that may contribute to training its models. It is one of three separately named agents: Claude-SearchBot crawls to improve the search results shown to Claude users, and Claude-User fetches a page because a person's question requires it.

Why it matters

The three names exist so the decisions can be separated, and most sites collapse them into one rule. Blocking ClaudeBot is a defensible position on training use and costs nothing in today's answers; blocking Claude-SearchBot removes your pages from what Claude can surface. A single Disallow aimed at "Anthropic" usually does the second by accident.

How to measure it

Request your own pages with each user agent and compare the status codes and the served HTML — a robots.txt reading alone will not catch a CDN rule or a WAF that blocks by agent. Anthropic documents the agent names and its robots.txt behaviour in its own help centre; Claude-User is documented as user-triggered, which is a different case from a scheduled crawl.

FAQ

Questions teams ask before they start

Is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap on technical access and content quality, but GEO measures the answer itself — whether the brand is named, recommended and cited — instead of a ranking position.

How often should results be remeasured?

Keep the question set stable and rerun on a fixed cadence, then compare like with like. Changing questions and cadence at the same time makes results incomparable.

Does being cited mean being recommended?

No. A page can be cited as background while a competitor is the one actually recommended. The two are reported separately.

Is this written by AI?

Drafts can be generated, but every published piece goes through human review. Nothing reaches the site automatically.

How does this relate to traditional SEO?

It overlaps but is not the same. Both reward clear, credible content; only one of them is measured by whether a model names you in an answer.

Where do the definitions come from?

From how the measurement actually works in the product, so the vocabulary on the site and the numbers in the workspace mean the same thing.

ClaudeBot

Definition

Why it matters

How to measure it

Keep exploring

Questions teams ask before they start

Turn AI visibility into a repeatable growth system.

ClaudeBot

Definition

Why it matters

How to measure it

Related terms

Keep exploring

Questions teams ask before they start

Turn AI visibility into a repeatable growth system.