Shared Claude Chats Appeared in Search After Google Indexed Public Links

Certain chats with Anthropic’s Claude were briefly visible in Google Search over the weekend. According to a handful of Reddit posts, entering a specific Google query caused shared Claude conversations to appear in search results, allowing strangers to read exchanges that the affected users didn’t intend to make fully public.

To be clear, these were not private Claude logs. When you chat with Claude, you can create a “Share” link for that conversation, allowing the recipient to view a snapshot of your discussion. These conversations are the ones that Google indexed. Ideally, however, that snapshot should be visible only to the recipient(s) of the Share link, not to the entire internet.

The indexed pages contained chat transcripts that sometimes included sensitive information, such as health data, internal documents, and personal details. One Claude transcript about cryptocurrency included “keys and everything,” according to a Reddit user; another user said they located one of the unsuspecting Claude user’s Solana wallets and it contained $2.73.

Anthropic says Claude chats stay private by default and only become public when a user creates a share link. The company doesn’t provide shared chat directories to search engines, so the leak is most likely coming from public pages, like a public forum, that search engines can find.

Credit: Hapabapa/Getty Images

A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch: “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.”

“These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves,” an Anthropic representative told our colleagues at ZDNET. “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 seems to have removed or de-indexed the exposed results after the issue drew attention, as the original trigger query, site:claude.ai/share, no longer works.

Though this shouldn’t have ever happened, it can be a lesson for chatbot users: Any chat shared with a public link can become more public than intended, and copies may remain in caches, archives, screenshots, or reposts even after removal. (As the adage goes, what happens on the internet stays on the internet.) Most importantly, don’t share your passwords, API keys, medical records, ID numbers, employment information, and so on within the AI chats that you plan to share.

Lastly, Anthropic’s privacy page says users can review shared chats in settings and unshare them to disable the link.