robots.txt rules
Copy the group you need into the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Keep only one option per bot.
At a glance
| Detail | OAI-SearchBot |
|---|---|
| Operator | OpenAI |
| Type | AI search crawler |
| What it does | Finds and indexes pages so they can appear and be cited in ChatGPT search. |
| robots.txt token | OAI-SearchBot |
| Example user agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/searchbot |
| Follows robots.txt | OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot follows robots.txt, and that changes can take about 24 hours to show in search results. |
| How to verify | Check the request IP against openai.com/searchbot.json. |
| If you block it | Your pages can stop appearing as sources in ChatGPT search answers. Training is not affected. |
| Source | OpenAI crawler documentation (developers.openai.com) |
User agent version numbers change over time. Match on the token, not the full string.
What OAI-SearchBot does
OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT uses when it searches the web. If you want your pages to be found, linked and cited in ChatGPT answers, this is the OpenAI crawler that matters most. OpenAI recommends allowing it and its published IP ranges.
Should you allow or block it?
Allow it. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is the most common reason a site disappears from ChatGPT citations.
If you block it: Your pages can stop appearing as sources in ChatGPT search answers. Training is not affected.
- Training crawlers decide whether your content helps build future models. Blocking them does not remove you from AI search today.
- Search crawlers decide whether AI engines can find and cite your pages. Blocking them usually costs visibility.
- User triggered fetchers read a page because a person asked. Blocking them stops the AI reading you at the moment someone is interested.
How to find OAI-SearchBot in your logs
Search your server or CDN access logs for the token OAI-SearchBot. This command counts visits by IP, path and status code in a standard access log:
grep -i "OAI-SearchBot" access.log | awk '{print $1, $7, $9}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
A run of 403 or 503 status codes means your firewall or bot protection is blocking it, even if robots.txt allows it. That is one of the most common hidden reasons sites lose AI visibility.
How to tell if a visit is genuine
Anyone can put OAI-SearchBot in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Check the request IP against openai.com/searchbot.json.
Other OpenAI bots
- GPTBot: training crawler. Collects public web pages that may be used to train OpenAI's models.
- ChatGPT-User: user triggered fetcher. Opens a page when a ChatGPT user, custom GPT or agent asks it to.