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.
Overview
| Operated By | Anthropic |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | September 14, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
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.
Claude-User's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude-User/1.0; +claude-user@anthropic.com) |
How To Block Claude-User With 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 September 14, 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 Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
13% of top websites block Claude-User in their robots.txts.
Overall AI Assistant Traffic
0.5% of all web traffic came from AI assistants.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by Claude-User.
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Does Claude-User Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Claude-User is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Claude-User respects it.
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 Tell if Claude-User Is Visiting My Website?
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.
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.