Ever shared a Claude chat? It may have appeared in Google Search

Some Meta AI app users appeared not to realize that conversations they shared were being posted to a public feed last summer, but in fairness to Meta, those users had ignored or misunderstood a disclaimer about how the feature worked. Claude is now facing a different kind of sharing controversy, after shared chats were found appearing in Google results.

The issue was highlighted in a post on the ClaudeAI subreddit (via ZDNet). The Reddit user found that searching Google for pages under the chatbots’ shared-chat address returned many conversations that users had previously chosen to share only with specific other people.

Claude’s sharing feature creates a snapshot of a conversation and generates a link that can be sent to someone else. Anyone with that link can view the shared chat, but it doesn’t provide access to the rest of the account or conversations that haven’t been shared.

A “site:claude.ai/share” Google search apparently surfaced a list of those conversations, making them discoverable without someone sending the link directly. Reddit users reported finding chats covering personal, professional, and potentially sensitive subjects. Some claimed to have encountered details such as cryptocurrency wallets and Social Security numbers, while ZDNet says it found conversations that could have legal or financial consequences for the people involved.

Anthropic disputes the suggestion that Claude itself made these links discoverable. In a statement to Android Authority, a spokesperson said:

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. 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 dismissed any notion that it had independently exposed the pages. A spokesperson told Android Authority:

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. We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives

Google added that the URLs may have been posted publicly on social media or forums, where search engines could find them. The company also pointed out that site owners have tools to keep pages out of Google Search and can quickly request the removal of URLs that are already appearing.

The two companies broadly agree on one possible route into search results: users could have posted the shared Claude links somewhere public that search engines could discover. Google also provides guidance on how owners can prevent pages from appearing in Search, including using a noindex tag.

The search stopped returning the same set of results shortly after the Reddit thread gained attention. ZDNet reported that some sharing links remained indexed on Google Search this morning, but they appear to have been removed at the time of publication.

Claude chats are private by default, so this doesn’t appear to affect conversations for which no sharing link was created. Anyone who has shared a chat can review those links by heading to Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats and selecting Manage, where active links can be disabled.