# Claude-User: Anthropic Agent for User Requests

> Claude-User opens a web page when a Claude user asks a question. Its robots.txt token, what a block changes and how to verify requests.

Claude-User is the Anthropic user agent that opens a web page when a person asks Claude a question that needs it. Anthropic describes these visits as user-initiated requests, not as an automatic crawl. If you want Claude to read your pages for its users, allow `Claude-User`. If you do not, block it in robots.txt.

## What Claude-User does

The [crawler help page](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler) says that Claude can access websites with the Claude-User agent when people ask it questions. The token lets site owners decide which sites Claude can open for these requests. Cloudflare puts Claude-User in the "AI Assistant" category of its [AI Crawl Control bot list](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/reference/bots/).

Two other tokens cover other jobs: [ClaudeBot](/ai-crawler-bot/claudebot/) for model training and [Claude-SearchBot](/ai-crawler-bot/claude-searchbot/) for the search index.

## robots.txt token and user agent

The robots.txt token is `Claude-User`. robots.txt is a text file at the site root with rules for crawlers. No full user-agent string is published for this agent. To find it in your logs, search for `Claude-User` in the User-Agent field. These requests follow the questions of users, not a crawl schedule.

## Does Claude-User obey robots.txt?

Yes. The help page says that the Anthropic bots obey robots.txt, and Claude-User is one of the three bots on that page. The API documentation for the [web fetch tool](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/web-fetch-tool) also lists robots.txt among the reasons that a fetch can be refused.

Other operators handle this differently. OpenAI does not promise that its user-initiated agent, [ChatGPT-User](/ai-crawler-bot/chatgpt-user/), obeys robots.txt.

## Block Claude-User

If you want to stop Claude from opening any page on your site, add this group to the robots.txt file in the top-level directory:

```
User-agent: Claude-User
Disallow: /
```

If you want to block only part of the site, disallow that path:

```
User-agent: Claude-User
Disallow: /members/
```

Add the group on each subdomain that you want to opt out.

## What a block changes

The help page says that a block stops the system from getting your content in response to a user query. This can reduce the visibility of your site when users search the web through Claude. Claude also cannot read your page for a user who pastes its URL into a chat.

The block covers only this agent. Training and search indexing keep their own rules.

## Verify requests

The IP ranges of the Anthropic bots are at [claude.com/crawling/bots.json](https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json). A Claude-User request from an address outside this list is unverified.

The help page advises against an IP block as an opt-out, because the block also stops the bots from reading your robots.txt. If you think that Claude-User does not obey your rules, write to claudebot@anthropic.com from an address at your domain.

For Claude as a product, see the [Claude guide](/ai-search-engine/claude/).

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