this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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How did Google discover public links of Claude chats? (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 days ago by KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This news item from a few weeks ago revealed that when users created a "public link" of their Claude chat history, that chat history ended up in Google's search queries.

Aren't these urls supposed to be more or less undiscoverable by virtue of the long string of random characters that they contain?

How did Google discover those urls?

Did these people publish the urls somewhere publically themselves?

Or did Google "fish" them out of their gmail inbox or something like that?

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[–] SnoopSqueak@lemmy.today 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Did these people publish the urls somewhere publically themselves?

They created a public link. Google scraped it because it wasn't told not to.

From the article:

A spokesman for Google made clear to the BBC that the company does not control "what pages are made public on the web," saying instead that action comes from websites.

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

As the search indexing of the chat logs is no longer occurring, it is likely Anthropic used available tools to quickly block the chat log links from search results. Google's process for a website owner to block a link is straightforward, but must be initiated by a website owner.

Google was not the only one:

Other search engines like Bing, Brave and Duck Duck Go, through which the Claude chat logs also appeared, were approached for comment.

[–] khanas1f@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anthropic blocked the scraping quickly when this came to light but does google still has the URLs that it has already scraped?

I understand that new shared chats won't show up but what about the old ones.

[–] SnoopSqueak@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, Anthropic presumably submitted a request to block search results that lead to Claude chats, as well as to remove the ones that were already there. Google's removal tool can remove results that had been indexed, and the "noindex" meta tag prevents future indexing, if I'm understanding correctly.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en

does google still has the URLs that it has already scraped?

My guess would be yes. I doubt the removal tool actually deletes content, more likely it just deactivates it. It could theoretically be reactived or used for something else, possibly even inbreeding (AI chat logs to train AI on) or selling data to whoever pays for it. But that is just a guess, I could be wrong. I don't have much optimism when it comes to corporations, they tend to be as evil as they can get away with. If they legally acquired the content from those links because Anthropic neglected to protect them, there may not be many limits to what Google can do with those chat logs.

[–] KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Why would AI companies respect noindex tags if they dont even care about copyright?

[–] SnoopSqueak@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah, they probably don't. But public search engines typically do.

It is very, very difficult to keep anything private these days.

[–] KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ah ok, looks like I didn't read the article carefully enough.

That still leaves two scenarios though:

  1. Claude fucked up, and gave Google a way to index public links of people. After this news broke, they asked Google (and other search engines) to not show those urls anymore.
  2. People fucked up and/or fell victim to Google's the data hunger, which let Google to index their public links, after which Claude asked Google not to index such links.

I guess, in the end, I'm mostly wondering if the long random strings of public links are generally "brute-force-discovered" by crawlers like Google, or whether "discovery" of such links requires some kind of breach.

[–] SnoopSqueak@lemmy.today 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Claude fucked up, and gave Google a way to index public links of people.

Anthropic fucked up, Claude is not a person.

After this news broke, they asked Google (and other search engines) to not show those urls anymore.

Correct, that seems to be the case.

People fucked up and/or fell victim to Google's the data hunger, which let Google to index their public links

Kind of. The user fuck up would be not realizing that Anthropic had no protections from search engines, and that by clicking "share" they were creating publicly accessible links.

after which Claude asked Google not to index such links.

Anthropic seems to have updated the domain those links are generated on so that crawlers do not index public chats, yes.

I guess, in the end, I'm mostly wondering if the long random strings of public links are generally "brute-force-discovered" by crawlers like Google, or whether "discovery" of such links requires some kind of breach.

I am also curious. I looked it up. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works

The first stage is finding out what pages exist on the web. There isn't a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly look for new and updated pages and add them to its list of known pages. This process is called "URL discovery". Some pages are known because Google has already visited them. Other pages are discovered when Google extracts a link from a known page to a new page: for example, a hub page, such as a category page, links to a new blog post.

If I had to guess based on this, Google had probably indexed the domain Claude or its frontend run on and automatically scooped up the public chats as they became available.

It is also possible that any Claude chat shared will still be accessible to web crawlers, if they just ignore the flags telling them not to scrape, crawl, access, index, etc.

[–] KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz 2 points 16 hours ago

Thank you this was very helpful.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i believe the links were posted somewhere public.. even if it's that google i highly doubt they would put things from people's browsing history or mailbox onto public search index

[–] sznowicki@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Someone once proved Google does crawl links found in the Chrome url bar. I don’t feel like trying to find that article now but I’m sure it was a case some case ago.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

At one point their browser extensions would scan search terms entered on pages and spider any results that appeared. The Bing team found that and created a honeypot where Bing would produce nonsense internal links for certain search terms, and then they'd see the Googlebot crawl those pages within a few minutes.

[–] justdaveisfine@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago

Without looking it up, I'd somewhat presume they pulled those URLs from people's metadata if they're using the Chrome browser.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

and they are likely the driving force behind reddit forcing an aggressive login method for users, rolling out. its most aggressive on reddit currently. they dint want Claude stealing reddit data, which google paid for, hence the forced login.

[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Google is an outfit that specializes in stealing data. They probably recovered the URLs from Chrome browsers, or browsing histories, http referrer... Google is everywhere, unavoidable and aggressively collects data on everyone about everything all the time.