Claude Chats Popped Up in Google Search Results. How to See If Yours Are Public – PCMag

Be careful what you share. Chats with Anthropic’s Claude AI were found indexed in Google search, briefly making them easy to find.

On Saturday, a Reddit user reported that typing “site:claude.ai/share” into the Google search box revealed hundreds of Claude chats. They included some surprising conversations—from weird conspiracy theories to asking for AI-generated erotic content—along with the first name or handle of each affected user.

(Credit: Reddit user -void1)

An example of one the shared chats found. (Credit: Anthropic)

The finding prompted some to accuse Anthropic of failing to protect user privacy. OpenAI faced a similar controversy last year when Google indexed shared user chats on ChatGPT that had been created with the public link function. In response, OpenAI removed the option to have chats appear in Google Search. 

But in Anthropic’s case, the company says the share function never directly sent the link information to search engines such as Google. Instead, Anthropic suggested that users who posted links to their shared chats on a forum or social media platform had those chats indexed by Google’s web crawlers.

“We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,” Anthropic said. 

(Credit: Anthropic)

The share function on Claude is optional and lets you create a public link to a chat that anyone can view. Anthropic tries to prohibit search engine crawlers via its Robot.txt file, which disallows crawling of claude.ai/share. But Google notes: “While Google won’t crawl or index the content blocked by a robots.txt file, we might still find and index a disallowed URL if it is linked from other places on the web.” 

Anthropic added: “These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”

Google also indicated that the indexing likely occurred because users had posted the shared Claude chats on the open web. “Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web, and these pages were indexed across many search engines,” Google tells PCMag. “We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives.” Websites can also place a “noindex meta tag” to block a page from appearing in Google Search results. 

The scale of the exposure may have been relatively small. One user tried archiving the indexed Claude chats, but only recovered 519 conversations.

Which Claude Chats Are Public?

Following the controversy, Google and other search engines appeared to stop indexing the shared Claude chats. Searching “site:claude.ai/share” no longer produces any results.

Others spotted Google indexing Claude “artifacts,” or AI-created documents/projects that are shareable as well. However, the users responsible for them may have wanted them to be public.

If you’re worried about a chat surfacing on Google, Anthropic lets you shut down shared chats and artifacts. Go to Settings > Privacy > Your Data, where you can see which chats and artifacts have been shared, and rescind access. If you share a Claude conversation through a private messaging platform, Google’s web crawlers shouldn’t be able to index it.