Checks / AI crawler access
robots.txt keeps Claude-User out of your home page and most of the site
Claude-User may read only the paths robots.txt allows for it. Your home page and the rest of the site stay closed to it, so it cannot cite them.
robots_partial_claude_user · AI crawler access · Error
What triggers it
robots.txt does not let Claude-User fetch your home page, but leaves some other paths open for it; the finding names the first three.
What to change
Remove the Disallow: / rule for Claude-User in robots.txt, or add Allow rules for the other paths you want read.
Example
Lines that allow Claude-User in robots.txt:
User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /How to confirm the fix
- Open https://example.com/robots.txt: the group that names Claude-User (or the * group, if none does) leaves most of the site open, the home page included
- Run a new crawl: the AI crawler table no longer reports Claude-User as mostly blocked
About Claude-User
Claude-User is the agent Claude may use to access a website when a person asks it a question. Anthropic says disabling it prevents retrieval of your content in response to a user query, which may reduce your visibility for user-directed web search. It is separate from ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot.
Search quality robot; its block affects indexing for search, not a user's live question.
Anthropic's help article does not print a user-agent string for the three robots, and it says its source IP addresses are on a list it links. Because Anthropic also says that blocking those addresses can stop its robots reading robots.txt, the article's advice is to control access in robots.txt rather than at the IP layer.
Job: User-triggered fetch. Follows robots.txt: Yes, Anthropic says its robots respect robots.txt.
Claude-User: operator, user-agent string and address list
How common it is
We have not measured how common this is on a sample of sites. Counts appear here when a study covers it.
About this check
| Check ID | robots_partial_claude_user |
|---|---|
| Report section | AI crawler access |
| Severity | Error |
| How it is decided | Measured: read directly from the page or the server's response. |
| Added | Before 19 Oct 2026 (versions 1 and 2), or a site-wide check with no version date yet |
| Status | Measured in every report |
| Report gives the code | Yes, one block for the site |
Settings by platform
For robots.txt, where the setting lives differs by platform. Our guides cover 13 of them: AI crawler settings by platform.
Related checks
- robots.txt keeps ChatGPT-User out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt keeps Claude-SearchBot out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt keeps OAI-SearchBot out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt keeps Perplexity-User out of your home page and most of the site
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