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AEO Canon · the reference for answer-engine optimization
AEO Glossary

ClaudeBot

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's web crawler that collects content used to train its Claude models, identified by the ClaudeBot user-agent and controllable via robots.txt.

BBurke Atkerson

ClaudeBot is Anthropic's crawler for gathering training data. It fetches public pages to help train the Claude family of models, identifies itself with the ClaudeBot user-agent, and respects robots.txt directives. Anthropic uses separate user-agents for user-initiated live fetches, so allowing or blocking ClaudeBot governs training use specifically.

As with other AI crawlers, ClaudeBot reads the HTML your server returns; content that only appears after JavaScript runs in a browser is effectively absent to it. Serving your content as crawlable, server-rendered text is the access pillar at work. The decision to allow ClaudeBot is a content-rights choice rather than a direct AEO lever — it affects whether your material informs the model, not whether a specific answer cites you today.

Example. A publisher that wants to keep its archives out of model training adds a User-agent: ClaudeBot / Disallow: / block to robots.txt, while a site pursuing maximum reach leaves it allowed alongside the other AI crawlers.

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