Claude-User

Operator

Anthropic

Type

AI Assistant

Official page

support.claude.com

robots.txt token

Claude-User

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Anthropic.

Published IP ranges

claude.com/crawling/bots.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Fetches pages when a Claude user asks a question that needs them.

Claude-User supports Claude AI users. When individuals ask questions to Claude, it may access websites using a Claude-User agent.

Anthropic

User agent

Requests from Claude-User carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude-User/1.0; +Claude-User@anthropic.com)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Claude-User

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Claude-User

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Claude-User
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

Claude-User allows site owners to control which sites can be accessed through these user-initiated requests.

Anthropic

Anthropic’s Bots respect “do not crawl” signals by honoring industry standard directives in robots.txt.

Anthropic

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

Unlike most user-initiated fetchers, Anthropic says this one honors robots.txt. Blocking it may reduce visibility in user-directed web search.

Disabling Claude-User on your site prevents our system from retrieving your content in response to a user query, which may reduce your site's visibility for user-directed web search.

Anthropic

How Vireo counts Claude-User

Vireo keeps requests from Claude-User out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Claude-User's user agents.

Sources

• Anthropic: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)