How to Make Sure Your Claude Chats Don't Get Shared Publicly (Again)

If you use Claude, Anthropic's AI chatbot, you might be aware that your chats may have been exposed on Google. The news broke over the weekend, as Redditors discovered a treasure trove of conversations between Claude users and their AI bots. All one had to do was search for a keyword followed by "site:claude.ai/share" to find Claude conversations about that topic. It was, to be frank, quite the mess.

Luckily, Anthropic quickly plugged the security hole. Ever since, searching Google with "site:claude.ai/share" returns no results, so you can't find any of these chats today if you try. However, it's not necessarily a huge comfort to know that Google indexed these conversations in the first place—and for the second time in a year, at that. Anthropic dealt with a similar situation back in September, and while it isn't alone—Google once also indexed ChatGPT conversations—you might understandably be concerned about future chats leaking onto the web, as well as wonder whether your current chats were exposed.

Why were Claude chats exposed?

The thing is, it doesn't seem like every Claude chat had an equal risk of exposure here. Anthropic is adamant it doesn't share chat links to Google directly; instead, the vast majority (if not the entirety) of these chats appear to be conversations that individuals decided to share with others on the open web, according to Google. Claude lets you share your chats publicly if you wish, and while that can be convenient for showing friends, family, or colleagues a specific discussion, it might also open up your chat to Google's web crawlers, as when you share a chat, it generates a public link.

So, there's a silver lining in that private Claude chats that weren't shared are unlikely to be involved in this latest exposure. If you don't share your chats with anyone, you should be in the clear—though Futurism did report that one user in September's Claude debacle swears they never shared their exposed chats. However, if you do share Claude chats, your conversations might have been part of the indexing that happened over the weekend.

Further complicating things, it seems that Claude's "artifacts" are still visible on Google. Claude generates artifacts when the content of your project meets certain criteria, and can include anything like documents, code snippets, HTML sites, SVG images, diagrams, flowcharts, and Interactive React components. In many cases, users may want these artifacts to be public, as they may be meant to be shared widely. However, if you don't want your artifacts indexed on Google, you'll have to take action.

How to protect your Claude chats from future exposure

While there doesn't appear to be any reliable way to identify whether your chats and artifacts were included in this exposure, you can ensure that none of them are ever indexed by a search engine in the future. To do so, you'll essentially have to shut down sharing.

To start, head to Settings > Privacy in Claude, then choose "Manage" next to "Shared chats." Once this new page appears, you'll see all shared chats, including a link to the conversation and the date shared. From here, scroll through the list and select "Unshare" next to each chat you'd like to remove. This won't delete your chats; only their snapshots connected to these public links.