What happens when you publish an artifact
It becomes a page on Anthropic's domain that anyone holding the link can open, without an account. That is the intended behaviour of a share feature. It is also more exposure than most people expect from a button labelled share.
Can search engines find it?
A public URL is discoverable in all the ordinary ways: someone posts it, it appears in a referrer, a crawler follows a link to it. Whether Google has it today is not something you can check reliably, and it is not something you control. The dependable move is not to rely on a link being obscure.
Unpublishing
Unpublishing stops future access. It cannot recall a copy someone already saved, and it cannot remove a cached snapshot from a third party. Unpublish anyway — it is strictly better than leaving it up — and then re-publish somewhere gated.
What private-by-default looks like instead
- The URL carries a 22-character random token: unguessable, unlisted, never indexed.
X-Robots-Tag: noai, noimageai, noindexon every response.Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, so the token does not leak into anyone else's logs.- Optional passcode, work-email gate, burn-after-read, and an expiry that deletes.
Re-publishing the artifact
curl -X POST https://read.botook.ai/v1/publish -F file=@index.htmlOr from the conversation itself, with the connector:
publish_html({ content: "<!doctype html>…", password: "hunter2" })Then close the public one
- Publish the HTML here and confirm the new link renders.
- Set the gate it should have had: passcode, email domain, or expiry.
- Unpublish the artifact on Anthropic's side.
- Send the new link to whoever needed it.
Keeping it inside the conversation
If nobody outside needs to see it, do not publish it at all. An artifact stays private to your conversation until you choose otherwise — this page is about the case where someone does need to open it.
Private is not the same as encrypted
A gated link controls who may open the page. It does not mean the host cannot read the bytes. For that, publish with end-to-end encryption: the key rides in the URL fragment, which browsers never transmit, so only ciphertext is stored.
Private is not the same as unshareable
Anyone you let in can screenshot, save, or forward what they saw. Every access-control system has this boundary; the useful question is who gets in, and whether you can shut the door later.
Shutting the door later
curl -X DELETE https://read.botook.ai/sites/SITE_ID \
-H "Authorization: Bearer otr_live_YOUR_KEY"A hard delete: record and stored object both. The link answers 410 from then on.
For a company audience
A work-email gate is the least annoying gate that still means something — anyone at the domain gets in after a one-time confirmation, nobody else does, and you never collected a list of names.
For one person
A passcode you send through another channel, or a burn-after-read link that closes after the first open.
For something you will revise
Publish once and replace in place. The link stays correct and there is never a second copy to keep private separately.
If it has already been indexed
Unpublishing stops future access; it does not reach into a search index or a cache that already has a copy. Between those two facts sits the only honest advice: assume anything that was public for a while may still be retrievable somewhere, and treat re-publishing privately as the fix for what happens next rather than as an undo for what already happened. If the content is genuinely sensitive — a key, a client's data, an unannounced plan — rotating the secret beats trying to recall the page.
Checking what you actually published
curl -sI https://read.botook.ai/p/UNLISTED_TOKEN/ | grep -i 'x-robots-tag\|referrer-policy'Verify the headers rather than trusting the label. That is the same rule this whole deployment runs on: a status code is not evidence that the artifact is right.
Questions
Can I make an already-public artifact retroactively private?
No — nobody can. Unpublish to stop future access, then re-publish behind a gate.
Will the private link be indexed?
No. It is unlisted, unguessable and marked
noindex.
Does the reader need a Claude account?
No, and that is often the actual reason to move it.