Claude chats were showing up in Google searches
Niv Bavarsky
Conversations with Claude that were intended to be private—some involving medical data and children’s phone numbers—were discovered in search engine results by Reddit users over the weekend.
How it happened: Users can create a shareable public link for Claude chats (much like you can with Google Docs), so friends or coworkers can view them. While a public Google Doc with your 80-page screenplay no one wants to read isn’t indexed for search, the Claude creations were.
Claude creator Anthropic told TechCrunch that those links only become public if they are posted where web crawlers can find them, like on a social media platform. Search engine companies had other explanations:
- A Google spokesperson told Wired that it gives Anthropic and any website owner “clear controls” over whether web pages are crawled or indexed.
- Microsoft’s Bing (it still exists) says that developers can use tags to block indexing. But when Wired reviewed the exposed Claude chats, it did not find the recommended “noindex” tag on those pages.
Chat, are we cooked? The Claude links were still publicly available as of Monday, but appear to have been erased from search results as of yesterday. However, it’s possible that third parties have already gotten their hands on the data.