Claude-Code

Claude-Code at a glance

Operator	Anthropic
Type	AI agent browser
Respects robots.txt	Yes — a Disallow rule is honored
If you allow it	Allowing it keeps your site reachable to AI agents acting for users — an emerging traffic channel worth keeping open.
If you block it	Blocking it stops agent-driven visits but provides no real content protection, since agents only fetch pages the user asked for.

What is Claude-Code?

Fetches docs/pages requested during Claude Code sessions. Agent crawlers browse the web on a user's behalf inside AI tools: opening pages, reading documentation, and completing tasks. Traffic arrives from engaged users who asked for exactly what you offer. Blocking agents does not protect content from training, but it does cut off this kind of high-intent visit.

Allowing it keeps your site reachable to AI agents acting for users — an emerging traffic channel worth keeping open.

Primary source: Anthropic's official crawler documentation.

Does Claude-Code respect robots.txt?

Yes. Claude-Code honors robots.txt directives, including wildcard rules and Allow lines. A Disallow rule for this crawler is respected — but remember robots.txt is a voluntary protocol across the whole industry, not a wall.

How to block Claude-Code

Add this group to your robots.txt to deny Claude-Code across your whole site:

User-agent: Claude-Code
Disallow: /

Blocking it stops agent-driven visits but provides no real content protection, since agents only fetch pages the user asked for.

How to allow Claude-Code

Claude-Code is allowed by default on every site. It only gets blocked if a matching rule exists — most often a global User-agent: * group with Disallow: /. To exempt it while blocking other bots, put an empty Disallow group for it before the global block:

User-agent: Claude-Code
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Does blocking Claude-Code hurt your rankings?

No — not for classic search. Claude-Code is not a Google user agent, so a robots.txt rule for it has no effect on Google rankings or indexing. The only thing you give up is what this specific AI agent browser does with your pages, described above.

How to verify Claude-Code is really hitting your site

robots.txt states what a compliant crawler may fetch; your access log shows what actually happened. Search the log for the token:

grep -i "Claude-Code" /var/log/nginx/access.log | tail -50

On Cloudflare the free plan does not expose raw request logs, so use Security Events to see blocked requests, or add a console.log line in a Worker to record the user agent. On Vercel or Netlify, filter the request log by user agent string.

User agents are trivially spoofable, which is why "I saw Claude-Code in my logs" is not proof. Because Claude-Code is documented to honor robots.txt, a request from it that ignores your rules is worth investigating — but a single stray hit is usually a misconfigured tool, not the real crawler.

Should you block Claude-Code?

• Allow it — agent traffic is a user asking an AI tool to do something on the open web, which is closer to a real visitor than a crawler is.
• Block it if the agent could trigger writes, purchases or state changes on your site, and you cannot tell agent traffic apart downstream.
• Expect growth here — agent browsers are the newest category and the least covered by classic bot management.

Other AI crawlers from Anthropic

Anthropic runs 6 distinct user agents. They are configured independently in robots.txt, so blocking one does not block the others — a detail that catches people out when they assume a single rule covers a whole vendor.

Crawler	Type	robots.txt	What it does
ClaudeBot	AI training	yes	Crawls content to train Claude models.
Claude-User	AI assistant fetcher	yes	Fetches pages when a Claude user asks about them. Not used for training.
Claude-SearchBot	AI search	yes	Powers Claude's search citation index.
Claude-Web	AI assistant fetcher	yes	Legacy web-fetch user agent for Claude.
Claude-Code this page	AI agent browser	yes	Fetches docs/pages requested during Claude Code sessions.
anthropic-ai	AI training	yes	Legacy training crawler.

Further reading

• How AI Crawlers Work (And What They Want From Your Site) — AI crawlers train models, build search indexes, or fetch pages on request. Meet the major bots, learn how they fetch pages, and why access is step zero.
• robots.txt for AI Crawlers: Every Rule That Matters — A 30-second robots.txt refresher, what each AI bot costs you when blocked, three copy-paste policies and the syntax mistakes that silently break your rules.

All 14 GEO guides · Full AI crawler directory