• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Conversations conducted with Anthropic's Claude became the latest public information from generative AI (GAI) chatbots to spill into Google, made searchable in results -- although similar snafus recently occurred in OpenAI and xAI.

“Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web,” a Google spokesperson told MediaPost in an email when asked whether there was something Google could do to prevent this from happening. “Publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines."

The latest snafu is indexed conversations from users of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, which users opted to share. Similar sharing features were implemented in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok, but then deleted. The share button created a dedicated place to host the content, making it possible for users to share links to the page.

Google offers tools that site owners can use to indicate that they do not wish certain pages and URLs to appear in search results, and is willing to remove pages from results in limited circumstances, largely guided by local law.

Google does not remove URLs from the web. Only site owners can do that. And if something is removed from Google Search results, it can still appear in the results of other search engines.

Anthropic spokesman Gabby Curtis told Forbes that Claude conversations were only visible on Google and Bing because users had posted links to the conversations online or on social media.

“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 of shared chats with search engines like Google and actively block them from crawling our site,” Curtis told Forbes in an email.

Anthropic told Forbes that it blocked crawlers from Google, preventing those pages from being indexed, unlike OpenAI and xAI. Despite this move, hundreds of Claude conversations still became accessible in search results, but have since been removed.