OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler. It surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. If you want ChatGPT to cite your pages, allow it.
What it does
OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features. It is not the training crawler: model training is controlled separately through GPTBot.
OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. It can take about 24 hours from a robots.txt update for OpenAI's systems to adjust.
In our 2026-11 study, 11.2% of popular sites with a robots.txt blocked it. →
robots.txt token
OAI-SearchBot
User-agent string
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/searchbotHow to allow it
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /How to block it
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /How to verify real visits
OpenAI publishes the IP ranges this agent uses as a JSON file. Match the source IP of the request against those ranges; a request that names OAI-SearchBot but comes from another address is not from OpenAI. OpenAI notes the version number in the user agent may change, so match the OAI-SearchBot token rather than the full string.
Check if your site lets it in →
OpenAI crawlers explained: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User →