ClaudeBot
Anthropic's crawler. Named here because Claude appears in several agencies' engine lists and its crawler almost never appears in their robots.txt advice.
Checkable · the test is below
What it means
A user agent that requests pages from your site on Anthropic's behalf. Like every other crawler, it identifies itself in your server logs and obeys your robots.txt.
Why it matters for an HVAC company
Four of the companies on our board name Claude among the engines they cover. If an agency measures Claude while your robots.txt blocks ClaudeBot, they are measuring an engine you have locked out and neither of you has noticed.
What would settle it
Two checks. Grep your server access logs for the user agent string to see whether it has visited and how often. Read your robots.txt to see whether it is permitted. The logs are the ground truth.
A worked example
A contractor's logs show 1,240 requests from ClaudeBot over ninety days, against 8,900 from Googlebot. It is reading the site. A second contractor's logs show zero, and their robots.txt explains why.