Claude-SearchBot
Anthropic documents Claude-SearchBot as search indexing for Claude's web-grounded answers. It is not the person who later clicks a citation.
- Operator
- Anthropic
- Motif family
- anthropic
- Motif class
- Search indexing
- In Motif classifier
- Yes
- robots.txt
- Vendor documents that it honors robots.txt
- Executes JavaScript
- No
- Verified in Motif
- Vendor IP guidance exists. Motif does not check source IPs
What Motif will and will not claim
Motif classifies Claude-SearchBot as family anthropic, class search, only on tracker or collector hits.
Revenue
Allowing this bot may affect whether Claude can cite you. Motif still ranks revenue on the human claude.ai referrer, not on the indexer.
Vendor documentation
Start with the vendor page at https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web. Motif stores the controlled token from a self-reported User-Agent.
Claude-SearchBot User-Agent example
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; Claude-SearchBot/1.0; +Claude-SearchBot@anthropic.comAllow Claude-SearchBot in robots.txt
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /Block Claude-SearchBot in robots.txt
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /Does Claude-SearchBot count as a visit in Motif?
No. If Claude-SearchBot hits the Motif tracker or collector it increments AI crawlers. It does not create a visitor and cannot win a recommendation.
Will Motif show Claude-SearchBot on my HTML pages?
Only if that client requested /m.js or POST /v1/events. HTML-only crawls of the origin never reach Motif. Saying otherwise would be a product lie.
Should I block Claude-SearchBot?
Search-index bots are how some assistants find pages to cite. Blocking them is a discovery policy, not a ranking in Motif. User-requested fetchers and model crawlers are separate decisions.