Share and publish are not the same thing
Sharing a conversation makes that conversation readable by anyone with its link. Publishing an artifact makes just the artifact readable, at its own address under claude.ai/public/artifacts. Both are public to anyone holding the link; they expose different things.
Tell them apart by the address
A published artifact lives at claude.ai/public/artifacts followed by a UUID. That address shows the artifact on its own, without the conversation that produced it.
A shared conversation has a different form of link and opens the thread: your prompts, Claude's replies, and any artifacts along the way. If the address contains public/artifacts, it is the artifact. Anything else that opens a conversation is a share.
A shared conversation exposes more than a published artifact
The artifact is the tidy output. The conversation is how you got there, and that is where the loose material sits: the data you pasted in to be reformatted, the earlier attempt naming the real client, the aside about why the deadline moved.
People publish an artifact deliberately and share a conversation casually, which is the wrong way round if you are judging by how much each one reveals.
One does not switch the other off
Unpublishing an artifact leaves a shared conversation working, and the artifact is usually still visible inside it. Stopping a share leaves a published artifact reachable at its own address.
If you are cleaning up after something sensitive, both have to be checked. Doing one and assuming the other followed is the common mistake.
What this index holds
Only published artifacts. A shared conversation link is not in here, because the crawl looks for the artifact URL pattern and nothing else.
That is a limit of this site, not a statement about safety. A shared conversation you have forgotten is still open to anyone with the link, and no index will remind you of it.
Verified against claude.ai on 2026-07-29. Claude changes, so a menu may have moved.