// OpenAI crawler

OAI-SearchBot:what it is and how to block it

OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that opt out are left out of ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.

robots.txt token: OAI-SearchBot
Operator: OpenAI
Purpose: AI search and assistant
Follows robots.txt: Says robots.txt controls access
User agent: Published
IP list: Published

// user agent

OAI-SearchBot user agent

robots.txt token

OAI-SearchBot

Full user-agent string 1

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot

Full user-agent string 2

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; robots.txt; +https://openai.com/searchbot

Examples from OpenAI, and the version number may change. The second form, with a robots.txt marker, may be used when it fetches your robots.txt file.

Source: OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers. Checked October 30, 2026.

// robots.txt

How to block OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as a robots.txt token and says a change can take about 24 hours to show in search results.

Blocking it removes your site from ChatGPT search results and from the links they carry.

GPTBot is OpenAI's separate training crawler, and ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT about it. OpenAI says each setting is independent, so a rule for one leaves the others alone.

Block it from the whole site

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Allow it everywhere

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Add the group to the robots.txt at the root of each host. A crawler with a group of its own ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any you still want it to follow.

Write rules for all 20 AI crawlers at once

// verify

How to verify a real OAI-SearchBot visit

OpenAI publishes OAI-SearchBot's IP addresses as JSON, and recommends allowing them if you want to appear in ChatGPT search.

Published IP list

https://openai.com/searchbot.json

// your site

See whether OAI-SearchBot visits your site

robots.txt testerCheck whether your rules let OAI-SearchBot reach any path, and which line decides it.Open the tool AI crawler blockerSee what your live robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot and the other 19 AI crawlers on our list today.Open the tool

Server Log MonitoringLists OAI-SearchBot by name with its hits, its 403s and whether it follows your robots.txt. Hits are checked against OpenAI's published addresses, and fakes land in Fake bots.

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// faq

Questions

Should I block OAI-SearchBot?

Only if you want out of ChatGPT search. Blocking it keeps your pages out of ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. To opt out of training only, block GPTBot instead.

Is OAI-SearchBot the same as ChatGPT-User?

No. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT something, and OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to it. OAI-SearchBot is the automatic search crawler.

Does blocking OAI-SearchBot affect my Google rankings?

No. OAI-SearchBot is not Googlebot, so a rule for it changes nothing about how Google Search crawls, indexes or ranks your pages.

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