OAI-SearchBot: a search crawler run by OpenAI
OAI-SearchBot is a search crawler. It reads pages for the index behind this product: ChatGPT search. Operator: OpenAI.
At a glance
- Operator
- OpenAI
- robots.txt token
OAI-SearchBot- Purpose
- Search. Search crawlers read pages to build the index an assistant searches when it answers. A page they cannot read cannot be found or cited in those answers.
- What it feeds
- ChatGPT search
What blocking it changes
If you keep OAI-SearchBot out, your pages cannot be found and cited in the search answers of this product: ChatGPT search.
User agent
The full user agent, from the operator’s documentation. A request from OAI-SearchBot carries this text, and a server log shows it.
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/searchbotrobots.txt lines for OAI-SearchBot
robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site (yoursite.com/robots.txt). A group starts with one or more User-agent lines that name crawlers, followed by Allow and Disallow lines for paths. A crawler named in a group follows the groups that name it and ignores the group for every crawler (User-agent: *).
To let it in
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /To keep it out
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Does your site let it in?
The free crawler check reads your robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and requests your page with its user agent, so it shows whether a robots.txt rule or a firewall turns it away.