What OAI-SearchBot does
OAI-SearchBot indexes pages so ChatGPT can search and cite them with links. It's the AI-era equivalent of Googlebot for ChatGPT search: being crawled here is what makes you citable — and clickable — inside ChatGPT answers.
Fact sheet
- Operator
- OpenAI
- robots.txt token
- OAI-SearchBot
- Honors robots.txt
- Yes (documented)
- Executes JavaScript
- No — invisible to browser analytics
- Identity verifiable by IP
- Yes — vendor publishes IP ranges (we verify every visit)
- Official documentation
- OpenAI docs ↗
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot
User-agent strings are free to fake — any scraper can claim to be OAI-SearchBot. That's why VisitorType checks every claimed OAI-SearchBot visit against OpenAI's published IP ranges and downgrades impostors to plain bots.
Allow or block via robots.txt
# Block OAI-SearchBot User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: / # Or allow it explicitly User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: /
Should you block OAI-SearchBot?
Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search results — the AI equivalent of de-indexing yourself from Google. For almost every business the answer is: don't. If you blocked all AI bots in one robots.txt sweep, this is the line to remove first.
Is OAI-SearchBot reading your site?
OAI-SearchBotnever runs JavaScript, so GA4 can't see it. VisitorType's server-side detection can — with per-page counts and IP-verified identity.
Measure it free