An Anthropic spokesperson has responded to the latest controversy surrounding the Claude conversations showing on Google Search. Several users have complained of Claude chatbot conversations being discovered on Google after they were made public. Now, Anthropic has clarified why they were visible on Google.
“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,” a (name?) spokeswoman told the BBC.
Shared Conversation is a feature in Claude that can be used as a way to share a chat link with colleagues or friends. In this case, Google Search made those conversations visible.
Many Claude users took to social media to report instances of discovering Claude conversations on Google Search. Users using the standard Google search operator “site:claude.ai/share”, were able to surface hundreds of shared conversations from Claude users.
What did Claude’s shared conversations expose?
Reports and screenshots circulating on X (formerly Twitter) highlighted conversations containing:
Public artefacts, i.e., generated outputs like presentations, code, or analyses hosted on “claude.ai/public/artifacts”, also appeared in search results, complete with descriptive titles.
Many users expressed concerns, noting that the platform’s “Share” feature creates a dedicated public webpage rather than a strictly private link. Anthropic had not applied a “noindex” directive (a standard robots.txt or meta tag instruction telling search engines not to index a page), allowing crawlers to treat shared chats like any other publicly linked content.
This is not the first time an issue like this has surfaced. A similar incident affected Claude conversations in 2025, with roughly 600 conversations indexed according to contemporary reports. OpenAI also faced an almost identical problem with ChatGPT shared links roughly a year earlier.
Anthropic fixed the issue immediately
Within hours, however, many Google results for “site:claude.ai/share” had vanished, which suggested that either Anthropic implemented a fix (such as adding noindex tags or deindexing requests), or Google acted quickly after the incident went viral.
However, similar search results reportedly lingered longer on Bing and other search engines. Cached versions and direct share links remain accessible unless users actively unshare them.
What should Claude users do to safeguard privacy
For Claude users, Anthropic provides a management tool under ‘Settings > Privacy > Your Data > Shared Chats.’
With this setting in place, your Claude conversations cannot be shared with anyone, thus preventing the risk of them getting shared or discovered on search engines.