# Claude-SearchBot vs Googlebot

Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot compared on 10 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | Claude-SearchBot | Googlebot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not_documented | yes | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | yes | no | different |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | not documented | 0.991 | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | search | search | same |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | no | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | yes | same |
| user_agent_string_full | not_documented | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | not_documented | yes | different |

## Differences

| Field | Claude-SearchBot statement | Googlebot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot. | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode return AI generated responses with links to supporting websites. |
| honours_crawl_delay | Claude-SearchBot respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when crawling domains. | Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for Googlebot. |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | not documented | Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z. |
| reads_llms_txt | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude-SearchBot reads llms.txt files. | Google Search does not use llms.txt files. |
| user_agent_string_full | Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot. | Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html). |
| verifiable_by_rdns | Anthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Claude-SearchBot. | Googlebot requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com. |

## Sources

- https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json
- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googlebot
- https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-content-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler