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ChatGPT-User

ChatGPT visiting a page because a user asked it to. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply.

Check if your site lets ChatGPT-User in Run the full AI Visibility Check

Last verified: October 2026, against OpenAI's own documentation.

ChatGPT-User at a glance.

Owner
OpenAI
Purpose
User-triggered. OpenAI uses ChatGPT-User for certain user actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs, such as visiting a page a user asked about. OpenAI says it doesn't crawl the web automatically and isn't used to decide whether content appears in search.
robots.txt token
ChatGPT-User
Full user agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
IP ranges
openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
Respects robots.txt?
robots.txt may not apply. Not reliably. OpenAI says that because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply. It points site owners to OAI-SearchBot for search opt-outs.

The robots.txt rules to copy.

Your robots.txt lives at the root of your domain, like yoursite.com/robots.txt. On Shopify you edit it by adding a robots.txt.liquid template to your theme. Shopify warns that a wrong edit can cost you all your traffic, so change one rule at a time.

Allow ChatGPT-User

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

A bot with no rule is already allowed. Add this only when a broader rule, such as User-agent: * with Disallow: /, would otherwise block it.

Block ChatGPT-User

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

Robots.txt won't reliably stop this one. OpenAI says this agent may not follow robots.txt. The rule states your preference. To enforce it, block the published IP ranges at your firewall or CDN.

Should you block ChatGPT-User on a local business site or a Shopify store?

When a customer pastes your URL into ChatGPT or asks it to check your page, this is the visitor. If it's blocked at your firewall, ChatGPT can't read your page for that person, and the answer gets built from whatever else it finds.

I'd allow it. If you need to stop it, a robots.txt rule may not be enough by OpenAI's own account, so the block would have to happen at the firewall using OpenAI's published IP list.

A rule you didn't write can block it too: an old robots.txt template, a security plugin or a CDN bot setting. The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt for ChatGPT-User and the other bots in this directory.

The 12 bots, sorted by job

  1. Search and answers

    3 bots

    They build the index an AI assistant searches when it answers.

    If you block themPer their owners, blocking one can drop you from that assistant's search answers.

  2. ChatGPT-User is in this group

    Fetching a page when a user asks

    3 bots

    They fetch your page because a person asked the assistant about it.

    If you block themBlocked at your firewall, the assistant can't read your page for the person who asked. Two of the three may not follow a robots.txt block.

  3. Model training

    6 bots

    A block here tells the owner to keep your pages out of AI model training. CCBot is here because its open archive can be used that way.

    If you block themFor most, the owner says blocking doesn't remove you from its search features. Meta says its crawler also indexes content for its products.

Where ChatGPT-User sits among the 12 AI bots in this directory, grouped by what each one does, with what blocking each group costs you.

Related crawlers.

Sources

Last verified: October 2026. Where the owner doesn't document something, this page says so instead of guessing.

  1. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers

Crawler access is the first thing I check in an AI answer audit. Most of what decides who gets named is what other sites say about you.

Check your robots.txt Or run the full AI Visibility Check