Claude AI chats and Google Docs shared via public links have turned up in search results. Here’s how to check your settings and keep them private.
Users of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot were surprised over the weekend to learn that some of their conversations may be discoverable on search engines like Google and Bing. The discovery is raising questions about how much control people actually have over what they share online — and it turns out Claude conversations aren’t the only thing at risk.
Anthropic allows Claude users to create public links to their chat threads, giving anyone with the link the ability to view the conversation, similar to sharing options on apps like Google Docs. What many users may not have realized is that this also meant their Claude conversations, however sensitive or personal, could show up in public search results.
As of Tuesday morning, no Claude chats appeared in the Google or Bing searches that had previously surfaced them, suggesting the exposed links had been taken down or blocked from indexing. Still, the episode has forced users of chatbots like Claude, and other online services more broadly, to confront a basic question: what does it actually mean to make something “shareable,” and what can you do to protect yourself?
How the Exposure Happened
The uproar began on Sunday, after Reddit users discovered that typing “site:claude.ai/share” into Google or Bing pulled up chat logs that included personal conversations. Once a user creates a publicly shareable link to a Claude chat, that chat becomes accessible to anyone with the link — and can end up discoverable by search engines. That means someone intending to share a conversation with a small group of people could inadvertently share it with the entire internet.
This isn’t the first time Claude chats have shown up in search results. After a similar incident in September, Anthropic told Forbes that chats became visible via Google and Bing because they had been shared online or on social media, and said it uses a “robots.txt” file — a set of instructions telling search engines what they can and cannot index — to try to prevent the problem.
Both Google and Bing instruct developers and site owners to take additional precautions, such as inserting a “noindex” HTML tag that tells web crawlers not to surface a page in search results. According to Wired, which reviewed several of the exposed Claude chats before they were taken down, many of them lacked that tag. Anthropic did not respond to questions about whether it had added the tag to shared links, and declined to comment for this story, though it has previously told other outlets that it does not share chat directories or sitemaps directly with search engines.
Google Docs Have the Same Problem
Users may want to check their sharing settings on other platforms too. Using a similar search technique, reporting found a long list of publicly linked Google documents containing sensitive information.
A site-specific search for Google Drive files containing the word “test” turned up several pages of documents, ranging from exams created by specific elementary and high schools to the results of lead and radon detector tests tied to specific locations. Searches for documents containing the word “confidential” surfaced files with potentially sensitive information, including a city health department confidentiality agreement; some of the exposed files dated back to 2003.
A Google spokesperson said these documents were discoverable because the links had been posted somewhere on the internet or on social media, not because Google actively indexes private Drive links.
Why This Keeps Happening
Neither Google nor Anthropic warns users that their files or chats could be indexed by search engines when they create a shareable link. Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist at the digital privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that gap in communication is the real problem.
“The privacy afforded by ‘anyone with a link’-style sharing of chats and documents is fragile,” Hoffman-Andrews said. “If you share something with a friend, and they share it with a friend, and they post it to social media, suddenly it’s findable and readable by anyone on the web.”
He recommends using “extreme caution” when creating shareable links, and suggests alternatives such as copying and pasting text or taking a screenshot instead of generating a public URL. “Designing to incentivize viral sharing can also lead to users unintentionally oversharing,” he added.
How to Make Your Shared Chats and Files Private Again
The good news is that both Claude and Google Drive let you revoke access to content you’ve previously shared.
On Claude (desktop browser):
- Click your profile icon in the bottom-left corner.
- Choose “Settings” from the menu.
- Navigate to the “Privacy” tab.
- Scroll down to the “Your data” section and click “Manage” next to public chats.
- From there, delete the public threads you no longer want shared.
On Google Drive:
- Open the individual document you’ve made public (settings must be changed file by file).
- Click “Share” in the top-right corner of the browser window.
- Change “General access” from “Anyone with the link” to “Restricted,” or limit it to specific people, groups, or spaces.
The visibility of both Claude chats and Google documents on search engines is a reminder to think carefully before choosing “anyone with the link” sharing for anything you wouldn’t want the entire internet to see.