What is Claude?
Claude is Anthropic's conversational AI assistant, which by default answers from what it learned during training and only fetches live web pages when a search feature is turned on for that conversation or product.
Out of the box, Claude works the way most people first experience chatbots: it answers from patterns learned during training, with no live web fetch involved unless the conversation or the product surface has web search switched on. When search is enabled, Claude retrieves current pages and grounds the answer in them, closer to how ChatGPT Search or Perplexity work by default.
This distinction matters for site owners because Anthropic runs separate crawlers for separate jobs: one for building training data, and separate ones for indexing and live fetching during an actual search-enabled conversation. A page can be thoroughly crawled for training purposes and still almost never appear in a cited answer, simply because far fewer Claude conversations have web search turned on at all compared to products where search is the default.
Related
- ClaudeBotClaudeBot is Anthropic's training crawler. Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User are separate agents that affect whether Claude can cite you.
- Training vs search crawlersA training crawler collects data models learn from. A search crawler builds the index an assistant cites when answering. Blocking one has nothing to do with the other.
- GroundingGrounding is when a model answers using documents retrieved at the time of the question, rather than only from what it absorbed during training.
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