Some Claude conversations that users chose to share turned up in Google search results this past weekend.
Claude includes a feature that lets users generate a public link to a chat so someone else can view it. Some of those links, meant to be shared privately, got crawled and indexed by Google over the weekend, making conversations searchable by anyone rather than just the intended recipient. The exposure was first reported over the weekend, along with steps for checking whether you have any shared chats and revoking access to them. It is unclear how many conversations were indexed or what they contained.
Chat histories can contain anything from mundane research to sensitive personal or work details, and a link meant for one person is not the same as a link meant for the open web. Search engines will index whatever they can crawl, so a shareable feature without safeguards against indexing quietly becomes a publishing feature. That is a meaningful gap for a product marketed on trust with sensitive queries.
This is a familiar stumble: other AI chatbots have run into the same problem when a share button doubled as an unintentional publish button. Check your own shared links before Google finds them for you.