What Is Claude-Web?

Claude-Web is an AI-related agent operated by Anthropic. It's currently unclear exactly what it's used for, since there's no official documentation. If you can provide more detail, please contact us. You can see how often Claude-Web visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Agent Type

Expected Behavior

Undocumented AI agents are operated by AI companies but lack official documentation explaining their purpose or behavior. They may be used for training data collection, search indexing, or experimental features not yet publicly announced. Some undocumented agents may also be deprecated or no longer actively used by their operators. Without documentation, it's unclear whether they respect robots.txt, how frequently they crawl, what data they prioritize, or how collected content is used.

Detail

User Agent String

Access other known user agent strings and recent IP addresses using the API.

Robots.txt

In this example, all pages are blocked. You can customize which pages are off-limits by swapping out / for a different disallowed path.

User-agent: Claude-Web # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/claude-web
Disallow: /

Frequently Asked Questions About Claude-Web

Should I Block Claude-Web?

Proceed with caution. Without documentation, it's impossible to know if these agents benefit or harm your interests. Consider monitoring their behavior and blocking them if they consume excessive resources, ignore rate limits, or appear to be collecting data without clear purpose.

How Do I Block Claude-Web?

If you want to, you can block or limit Claude-Web's access by configuring user agent token rules in your robots.txt file. The best way to do this is using Automatic Robots.txt, which blocks all agents of this type and updates continuously as new agents are released. While the vast majority of agents operated by reputable companies honor these robots.txt directives, bad actors may choose to ignore them entirely. In that case, you'll need to implement alternative blocking methods such as firewall rules or server-level restrictions. You can verify whether Claude-Web is respecting your rules by setting up Agent Analytics to monitor its visits to your website.

Will Blocking Claude-Web Hurt My SEO?

The SEO impact of blocking undocumented AI agents is unclear since their purpose is unknown. They could be experimental search crawlers, data collection tools, or deprecated services. Monitor your search performance after blocking to identify any unexpected ranking changes.

Does Claude-Web Access Private Content?

The scope of undocumented AI agents is unclear since their purpose and configuration are unknown. They could be limited to public content like most crawlers, or they might attempt to access protected resources depending on their intended function. Without documentation, it's impossible to determine their access boundaries or privacy practices.

How Can I Tell if Claude-Web Is Visiting My Website?

Setting up Agent Analytics will give you realtime visibility into Claude-Web visiting your website, along with hundreds of other AI agents, crawlers, and scrapers. This will also let you measure human traffic to your website coming from AI search and chat LLM platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Why Is Claude-Web Visiting My Website?

Claude-Web may have found your site through various discovery methods including following links, processing sitemaps, or being directed to specific content. Without official documentation, it's unclear exactly how this agent selects which sites to visit or what triggers its access to your particular content.

How Can I Authenticate Visits From Claude-Web?

Agent Analytics authenticates agent visits from many agents, letting you know whether each one was actually from that agent, or spoofed by a bad actor. This helps you identify suspicious traffic patterns and make informed decisions about blocking or allowing specific user agents.