OAI-SearchBot
Operated by OpenAI · Powers ChatGPT Search
OAI-SearchBot crawls and indexes the public web to power ChatGPT Search — According to OpenAI, blocking it can prevent your content from being found, shown, or cited in ChatGPT Search results. Unlike ChatGPT-User, it isn't triggered by a specific user request; unlike GPTBot, it doesn't feed model training.
What it does
OAI-SearchBot crawls and indexes public web content to build ChatGPT Search's index, similar to how a traditional search engine crawler works. It determines whether your pages can be found, shown, and cited when users search within ChatGPT.
It is not used to train OpenAI's underlying language models — that's GPTBot's job — and it operates independently of ChatGPT-User, which only fetches pages on demand for a specific user request. OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot have independent robots.txt controls. When both are allowed, OpenAI may reuse one crawl for both permitted purposes.
Why we recommend keeping it open
- Blocking it can prevent your content from appearing in ChatGPT Search results and citations
- Not used to train OpenAI's models — indexing only
- Blocking it has an immediate, direct impact on your AI search visibility, unlike GPTBot or OAI-AdsBot
- To request full exclusion, use noindex and ensure OpenAI can access the directive.
Identification & robots.txt
OAI-SearchBot
Verify using OpenAI's officially published IP ranges.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /