Rattlesnakes By Mail

Claude-User vs Googlebot

Claude-User and Googlebot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

FieldClaude-UserGooglebotComparison
cites_sourcesnot_documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delayyesnodifferent
observed_verified_request_ratio_censusnot documented0.991different
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documenteduser_fetchsearchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednodifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
separate_search_and_training_tokensnot_documentedyesdifferent
user_agent_string_fullnot_documentedMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)different
user_fetch_exception_documentednonot documenteddifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsnot_documentedyesdifferent

Differences

FieldClaude-User statementGooglebot statement
cites_sourcesAnthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User.Google AI Overviews and AI Mode return AI generated responses with links to supporting websites.
honours_crawl_delayClaude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages.Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for Googlebot.
observed_verified_request_ratio_censusnot documentedGooglebot 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.
purpose_documentedClaude-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude.Googlebot crawls pages for Google Search, Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover.
reads_llms_txtAnthropic does not publish whether Claude-User reads llms.txt files.Google Search does not use llms.txt files.
separate_search_and_training_tokensAnthropic does not document Claude-User as a search or training opt-out token.Google separates Search crawling under the Googlebot token from Gemini training under the Google-Extended token.
user_agent_string_fullAnthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-User.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).
user_fetch_exception_documentedAnthropic applies the same robots.txt statement to Claude-User as to ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot and documents no exception for user-initiated fetches.not documented
verifiable_by_rdnsAnthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Claude-User.Googlebot requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com.

Sources