OAI-SearchBot
AI search indexerOpenAI's crawler for the search index behind ChatGPT search. It discovers and indexes pages so they can be surfaced as linked, cited results. OpenAI states it is not used for training.
| Operator | OpenAI |
| Type | AI search indexer |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes (documented) |
| Documentation | Official operator documentation |
OAI-SearchBot user-agent string
This is how OAI-SearchBot identifies itself in your server logs:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbotHow to block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt
Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your site:
Block OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Explicitly allow OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /What blocking changes: Your site is dropped from ChatGPT search results and loses those citation links, an emerging referral channel that shows up as ChatGPT traffic in your analytics.
Want to decide for all AI bots at once? Use the AI robots.txt generator.
Other ai search indexers
- Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic)
- Googlebot (Google)
- PerplexityBot (Perplexity)
- Bingbot (Microsoft)
- Applebot (Apple)
- YouBot (You.com)
Is OpenAI sending you visitors?
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