AI search · OpenAI
OAI-SearchBot
Builds the index ChatGPT search answers from. OpenAI states it is not used for training. Sites that want to appear in ChatGPT's cited sources should allow it even when they block GPTBot.
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Purpose
- AI search indexers
- Feeds
- ChatGPT Search
- robots.txt token
OAI-SearchBot- Honours robots.txt
- Honours robots.txt
- Documentation
- platform.openai.com
What it looks like in server logs
A representative user-agent string. Version numbers change; the OAI-SearchBot token does not. Paste your own log line into the user-agent checker to confirm a match.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbotHow to block OAI-SearchBot
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Robots.txt is advisory: it works only on crawlers that choose to read it. This one is honours robots.txt according to its operator.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /
To block every ai search indexer at once, or to block training while keeping AI search citations, use the robots.txt generator.
How to allow OAI-SearchBot while blocking others
A more specific User-agent group wins over a wildcard. Place this above any User-agent: * block that disallows paths, and OAI-SearchBot keeps full access.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
How to verify a genuine hit
The user-agent string is self-asserted: anyone can send it from a laptop, and scrapers routinely impersonate well-known crawlers to slip past filters aimed at unknown ones.
OpenAI publishes its IP ranges as JSON; a hit from outside them is spoofed.