How Claude Crawls and Indexes Your Website

In March 2025, Anthropic introduced live web search to Claude, its conversational AI. This update gave Claude the ability to fetch fresh information from the web, cite sources in real-time, and respond with more timely, relevant answers. 

For Claude to include your content in its generative responses or search index, it has to be able to access and understand it.

Like Google, Claude relies on crawlability, indexability, and proper site structure to surface your content. If you want your site to show up in Claude's citations or internal search, you need to make sure it’s technically accessible and aligned with modern SEO standards.

This guide walks through how Claude interacts with your site, what tools and configurations control that interaction, and the best practices you should adopt to ensure visibility in a world where AI and search are converging.

Meet Claude’s Crawlers

Claude uses multiple bots to interact with the web. Each has a distinct role:

ClaudeBot

Anthropic’s main crawler for model training. ClaudeBot visits public websites to collect data that improves Claude’s long-term knowledge. If you want your site excluded from AI model training, this is the bot to block.

Claude-User

This bot appears when a user query prompts Claude to retrieve real-time information. It fetches content on demand to answer specific prompts. If blocked, Claude can’t include your pages in live, cited answers.

Claude-SearchBot

This crawler evaluates web pages for Claude’s internal search feature. If you want to appear in Claude’s embedded results, you’ll need to allow this bot access.

All of Claude’s bots respect the Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt), observe crawl delay rules, and don’t circumvent access restrictions like CAPTCHAs or authentication walls.

Crawling and Indexing 101 (Claude Edition)

Before Claude can cite, summarize, or surface your content, it needs to find and understand it. That starts with crawling, and Claude’s web agents work similarly to traditional search engine bots, with a few key distinctions.

Step 1: Crawling

Claude uses three bots—ClaudeBot, Claude-User, and Claude-SearchBot—to fetch content. These bots follow public links, obey robots.txt, and do not execute JavaScript. If your content isn’t visible in the raw HTML, Claude won’t see it.

Step 2: Indexing

After crawling, Claude evaluates pages for relevance, trustworthiness, and structure. This determines whether a page is:

• Summarized in real-time (via Claude-User)
• Included in internal search (via Claude-SearchBot)
• Used in long-term knowledge development (via ClaudeBot)

Claude doesn’t maintain a public-facing index like Google. Instead, content is pulled into responses on demand, so freshness and accessibility matter more than page rank.

Non-Negotiables for Claude Visibility:

• Don’t block Claude’s bots in robots.txt
• Expose important content in server-rendered HTML (not JavaScript)
• Return clean 200 responses for indexable pages
• Keep your content within reach—no login gates, session tokens, or CAPTCHA walls
• Avoid redirect loops, JS-only navigation, or deep orphaned URLs

🛠️ Pro Tip: Use server logs or tools like Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer to track access from:

User-agent: ClaudeBot  
User-agent: Claude-User  
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot  

Claude doesn’t use a Search Console (yet), so these logs are your best window into crawler activity.

Claude’s goal is not just to list your page, but to understand it well enough to quote it intelligently. That makes clarity, structure, and crawlability your most important levers.

Master Your Robots.txt File and XML Sitemap

To ensure Claude’s crawlers can access and understand your content, you need to configure two foundational tools: your robots.txt file and your sitemap.xml.

Define Crawl Access with Robots.txt

Your robots.txt file lives at the root of your domain (e.g., https://example.com/robots.txt). It tells crawlers—including ClaudeBot, Claude-User, and Claude-SearchBot—what they can and can’t fetch.

Use it to:

• Prevent crawling of low-value or sensitive pages (e.g., login screens, internal tools, search results)
• Set crawl delay instructions (for ClaudeBot only)
• Declare the location of your sitemap
  

Example:

# robots.txt for Claude and others
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /search/

# Claude-specific crawl delay (optional)
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Crawl-delay: 2

# Let Claude (or others) crawl a support article nested under /search/
Allow: /search/help-center/important-article/

# Declare your sitemap
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Blocking a page in robots.txt does not guarantee it won’t be indexed. If that page is linked from elsewhere, Claude may still see and cite the URL—just without content. Use meta name="robots" content="noindex" for stronger control.

Sitemap.xml: Help Claude Find Your Content

While Anthropic hasn’t confirmed that Claude actively parses sitemaps, keeping yours clean and accurate remains a best practice, especially for secondary indexing systems and future compatibility.

Best practices for your sitemap:

• Include only canonical, indexable URLs
• Exclude 404s, redirects, or non-200 pages
• Update regularly with fresh <lastmod> timestamps
• Split into multiple sitemaps if you have over 50,000 URLs or exceed 50MB uncompressed
  

Declare it in robots.txt:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Even if Claude doesn’t ingest your sitemap directly, doing this supports broader visibility across search engines and AI tools that may feed Claude’s knowledge pipeline.

Preventing Indexing with Meta Tags

To stop Claude from indexing a page, use meta tags in the HTML of the page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

This tag goes inside the <head> section of your HTML. It signals to Claude (and other bots that respect the robots meta directive) not to include the page in its index.

You can also combine or use other common directives:

• nofollow: Don’t follow links on this page.
• nosnippet: Don’t show any text or media snippet in search results.
• noarchive: Don’t allow cached versions of the page to appear.
• unavailable_after: [date/time]: Don’t show this page after a specific date/time.

For example:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:0">

For non-HTML assets like PDFs or videos, use HTTP headers:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Avoid blocking these files in robots.txt if you still want the meta directives to be read—Claude’s crawlers need to access the page in order to obey the tags.

Claude Doesn’t Render JavaScript

Claude’s crawlers do not execute JavaScript. Here’s the analysis:

• Claude fetches JavaScript files (~23.8% of requests), but does not render them.
• Any client-side rendered content will be invisible unless it’s part of the original HTML.

That means:

• Content must be server-side rendered (SSR, ISR, or SSG) to be seen.
• Critical content (like articles, metadata, navigation) should not rely on client-side rendering.
• You can still use JavaScript for enhancements (like counters or dynamic widgets), but don’t make it a dependency for visibility.

SEO Best Practices That Help Claude

Claude is a next-generation AI, but its web visibility depends on tried-and-true web fundamentals:

• Crawl depth: Keep key pages no more than three clicks from your homepage.
• Internal linking: Use anchor text that reflects page content. Avoid orphaned pages.
• Clean URLs: Avoid excessive parameters. Use hyphens instead of underscores.
• HTML navigation: Don’t rely on JavaScript-rendered links alone.
• Page speed: Optimize Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
• Mobile-first design: Use responsive layouts and mobile-friendly fonts.
• Canonical tags: Prevent duplicate content and ensure proper consolidation.
• Structured content: Use headers (<h1>, <h2>) to create logical hierarchy.
• Content clarity: Favor concise, readable paragraphs that answer questions clearly.

Do Claude’s Crawlers Use Sitemaps?

Anthropic hasn’t confirmed sitemap usage, but it’s still worth submitting yours. Declare it in robots.txt:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Best practices for sitemaps:

• Only include canonical, indexable URLs
• Exclude 404s, redirects, or non-200 responses
• Break large sets into multiple files (max 50,000 URLs or 50MB)
• Keep them updated with fresh content

Even if Claude doesn’t parse sitemaps directly, other search engines (and LLM models trained on web data) will.

Schema and Structured Data for Claude

Structured data improves how Claude understands your content contextually. Claude may use schema markup to:

• Extract product specs or reviews
• Parse FAQs or How-To content
• Identify article headlines, authors, and timestamps

Use schema types like:

• Article, BlogPosting
• Product, Review
• FAQPage, HowTo

You can implement structured data in two main formats: 

JSON-LD (preferred):

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": "Your Blog Title",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Author Name"
  },
  "datePublished": "2025-03-01",
  "description": "A quick summary of your article."
}
</script>

Microdata (inline HTML):

<article itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/BlogPosting">
  <h1 itemprop="headline">Your Blog Title</h1>
  <span itemprop="author">Author Name</span>
  <time itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2025-03-01">March 1, 2025</time>
</article>

You can validate your markup using Google's Rich Results Test or Schema.org’s validator.

At a minimum, consider marking up:

• Articles or blog posts
• Product pages
• FAQ sections
• How-to guides

These structures help both traditional search engines and AI agents surface your most important content correctly and keep it aligned with the intent behind the page.

Should You Use llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed AI-specific standard—a Markdown file that provides a structured table of contents for LLMs. It’s placed at your root domain https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt:

Let’s be clear:

• Claude publishes an llms.txt, but Anthropic has not confirmed its crawlers support or use it.
• Think of llms.txt as an experimental signal—not a standard like robots.txt or sitemap.xml.

Pros:

• Organizing high-value links for in-context summarization
• Making content easier to parse during user-driven browsing (Claude-User)
• Enhancing future compatibility if standardization occurs

Cons:

• There’s no evidence it improves citation or indexing today
• It may never become a formal protocol
• John Mueller (Google) compared it to the now-defunct meta keywords tag

Bottom line: llms.txt is easy to create and might help, but don’t rely on it for visibility.

Sample structure:

# Title
Brief description of the site.

## Section Name
- [Link Title](https://link_url): Optional description
- [Link Title](https://link_url/subpath): Optional description

## Another Section
- [Link Title](https://link_url): Optional description

If you do use llms.txt, treat it as a bonus layer, not a core requirement.

How to Monitor Claude’s Crawlers

Unlike Google, Anthropic doesn’t offer its own Search Console. To monitor crawler behavior:

1. Enable access logs on your server
2. Filter by user-agent:
   
   • ClaudeBot
   • Claude-User
   • Claude-SearchBot
3. Track:
   
   • Crawl frequency per page
   • Response codes (200, 404, 301, etc.)
   • Crawl timing and geographic IP

For high-traffic or multi-domain sites, use log analysis tools (e.g., Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer, Botify, or custom ELK stack setups).

Claude Visibility Checklist

Use this to guide your optimization:

• Use robots.txt to allow or block specific bots
• Add noindex tags for content you want excluded from search
• Structure your site logically—fast, clear, link-rich
• Publish and maintain a sitemap
• Monitor access through server logs

Claude represents a new layer of web discovery. As AI assistants begin to compete with traditional search engines, your content’s visibility increasingly depends on how well it can be accessed, parsed, and interpreted by these models.

AI doesn't rank pages in the same way search engines do. It summarizes, cites, and integrates content into synthesized answers. That means your content needs to be not just indexable, but also answerable.

At daydream, we help you bridge the gap between classic SEO and AI-first visibility. From crawl architecture to structured content to LLM optimization, we ensure that your brand shows up where users are asking questions next.

References:

1. How To Check If Google Crawled My Site
2. How To Use XML Sitemaps To Boost SEO
3. What Is a robots.txt File?
4. How Robots Crawl
5. In-depth guide to how Google Search works
6. Internal Linking Strategies for Better Crawling
7. Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?
8. Claude can now search the web