Claude-User: Anthropic's live-answer fetcher
Claude-User is the fetcher Claude sends when a person asks it a question and it opens a page to answer.
Picked is an AI visibility tool for agencies and B2B SaaS teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the prompts your buyers ask, records which brands and pages they name, and writes the article built to become the source they quote.
At a glance
Claude-User in one table
- Company
- Anthropic
- What it's for
- Live answer: fetched while answering someone's question.
- robots.txt token
Claude-User- Full user agent
- Anthropic publishes the token only, not the full string.
- Follows robots.txt
- Follows it. Anthropic says blocking it stops Claude from fetching the site's pages for a person's question, which may lower the site's visibility in Claude's answers.
- How to verify
- Check the visitor's IP against the list Anthropic publishes. A request outside it isn't Claude-User, whatever its user agent says. The IP list
- Source
- Anthropic's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
What to know
Claude-User, in practice
Claude-User opens a page when someone asks Claude a question and Claude decides to read the web for it. Anthropic says blocking it stops Claude fetching your pages for those questions, which can lower your visibility in its answers.
Unlike OpenAI's and Perplexity's live fetchers, Anthropic says all its agents follow robots.txt. A broad Disallow: / meant for training therefore also keeps Claude's answers away from your pages.
It only comes when a person asks, so it's the quietest of Anthropic's three agents in most logs, ours included. Each visit is worth more than a crawl: it's a question about your subject, asked just now.
Real data
What Claude-User read on a real site
LaunchOn.it, our own launch platform, tracked in Picked through Cloudflare from September 12 to October 11, 2026. One site, so read it as an example, not an average.
91
Requests in 30 days
23
Different pages read
24 of 30
Days it came
37%
Verified by Cloudflare as the real bot
98% of its requests got a page back; 1% hit an address that doesn't exist.
- / (homepage)34%
- /robots.txt16%
- /api/12%
- /pricing8%
- /rules4%
By the first folder of the address. /_next/ holds the site's scripts and images.
robots.txt
Allow Claude-User
Allow it. Each visit is a person asking an AI something your page helps answer, right now. Blocking it costs you that answer wherever the bot honours the rule.
User-agent: Claude-UserAllow: /Needed only if a wider rule blocks it: robots.txt lets every bot in by default. A bot named in its own group ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat your private paths there as Disallow lines. A block in your CDN or firewall has to be lifted there.
A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether Claude-User reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
From Anthropic's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
Claude-User is the fetcher Claude sends when a person asks it a question and it opens a page to answer.
Anthropic says blocking it stops Claude from fetching the site's pages for a person's question, which may lower the site's visibility in Claude's answers.
Check the visitor's IP against the list Anthropic publishes. A request outside it isn't Claude-User, whatever its user agent says.
Allow it. Each visit is a person asking an AI something your page helps answer, right now. Blocking it costs you that answer wherever the bot honours the rule.
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