OAI-SearchBot user agent
Operated by OpenAI
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler that finds and indexes pages so ChatGPT search can show and link to them.
The OAI-SearchBot bot at a glance
- OAI-SearchBot is operated by OpenAI and indexes web pages so an AI search product can show and cite them in answers.
- The robots.txt token for OAI-SearchBot is OAI-SearchBot.
- Blocking an AI search crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- OAI-SearchBot robots.txt support: Yes.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Allow.
What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot builds the index behind search results in ChatGPT. OpenAI states that content it collects is not used to train foundation models.
Sites that block OAI-SearchBot can still appear as plain navigational links, but lose the summaries and citations in ChatGPT search answers.
- robots.txt changes for OAI-SearchBot can take about 24 hours to apply.
Should you block OAI-SearchBot?
Allow OAI-SearchBot unless it causes a measurable load problem.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an AI search crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | Blocking removes your pages from that AI search index, so its answers can no longer cite or link to your website. |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes |
| Recommendation | Allow |
How to block or allow OAI-SearchBot
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token OAI-SearchBot is matched case-insensitively.
robots.txt: block
# Block OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep OAI-SearchBot out of private areas only
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to OAI-SearchBot
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(OAI\-SearchBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to OAI-SearchBot
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (OAI\-SearchBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "OAI-SearchBot")How to verify real OAI-SearchBot traffic
OpenAI publishes the IP ranges that OAI-SearchBot uses. A request with the OAI-SearchBot user agent from an IP outside that list is an impersonator.
How to find OAI-SearchBot in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts OAI-SearchBot requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "OAI-SearchBot" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
OAI-SearchBot user agent string
The full user agent OpenAI publishes for OAI-SearchBot. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole 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/searchbotOAI-SearchBot FAQ
OAI-SearchBot identifies itself with the robots.txt token "OAI-SearchBot". A typical request header reads: 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/searchbot
Yes. OpenAI states that OAI-SearchBot follows robots.txt rules written for the "OAI-SearchBot" token.
Blocking an AI search crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. Blocking removes your pages from that AI search index, so its answers can no longer cite or link to your website.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Yes. OpenAI publishes the IP ranges OAI-SearchBot uses. Check the request IP against that list; a matching user agent from any other IP is an impersonator.
Search your server access log for "OAI-SearchBot", for example with: grep -i "OAI-SearchBot" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: OpenAI crawler documentation. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
