What is Claude-User?
Claude-User is dispatched by Anthropic's Claude AI assistant in response to user prompts, when it needs to fetch content to include in its answers. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Claude-User visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude-User/1.0; +claude-user@anthropic.com) |
| Operated By | Anthropic |
| Identity |
Verified
Verified Identification
Requests claiming to be this agent can be authenticated using its published verification method. |
| Triggered By | User action |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Yes |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
Why Is Claude-User Visiting My Website?
A user asked Anthropic's assistant a question your page could help answer. Claude-User retrieved the page to support its response, often with a citation linking back to your site.
Should I Block Claude-User?
Usually not. Blocking Claude-User can keep your pages out of AI-generated answers and eliminate potential citation traffic. It does not improve traditional search rankings. For context, 13% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Claude-User.
How Do I Block Claude-User Using Robots.txt?
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Claude-User from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI assistants at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Claude-User # https://knownagents.com/agents/claude-user
Disallow: /Insights for Claude-User
As of October 30, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Claude-User?
Claude-User makes isolated, on-demand requests rather than crawling your site. Traffic follows user demand, ranging from sporadic fetches to steady visits for a popular assistant.
Does Claude-User Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Claude-User is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step if you want to block it. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Claude-User respects it.
Is Claude-User Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. Claude-User is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking Claude-User Affect AI Search or Citations?
Yes, for requests handled by Claude-User. Blocking it can prevent the assistant from retrieving your pages for an answer or linking to them, but a separate crawler may control automatic AI search indexing.
Does Claude-User Access Private Content?
Not ordinarily. Claude-User fetches pages as an anonymous visitor without a stored login. Content protected by a paywall or login remains out of reach.
How Can I Verify a Request From Claude-User?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from Claude-User and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using Claude-User's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Claude-User". Look for a single-page request with no follow-up navigation. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be Claude-User.
How Is Claude-User Different From Other Anthropic Agents?
Anthropic operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- Claude-Code: Claude Code is an AI coding agent by Anthropic that can build, debug, and ship code directly from the terminal, handling tasks like codebase onboarding, multi-file edits,…
- ClaudeBot: ClaudeBot is a web crawler operated by Anthropic to download training data for its LLMs (Large Language Models) that power AI products like Claude.
- Claude-SearchBot: Claude-SearchBot is used to create an index of websites that can be surfaced as results in Anthropic's Claude AI assistant search feature.
- anthropic-ai: anthropic-ai is a unconfirmed agent possibly used by Anthropic to download training data for its LLMs (Large Language Models) that power AI products like Claude.
- Claude-Web: Claude-Web is an AI-related agent operated by Anthropic. It's currently unclear exactly what it's used for, since there's no official documentation.