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OAI-SearchBot

The crawler behind ChatGPT search. OpenAI says pages that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT's search answers.

Check if your site lets OAI-SearchBot in Run the full AI Visibility Check

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

OAI-SearchBot at a glance.

Owner
OpenAI
Purpose
Search. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features, and recommends allowing it if you want to appear there.
robots.txt token
OAI-SearchBot
Full user agent
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

OpenAI says the version number may change.

IP ranges
openai.com/searchbot.json

OpenAI recommends allowing requests from these ranges as well as the robots.txt token.

Respects robots.txt?
Respects robots.txt. Yes. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. It also says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to reach its search systems.

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 OAI-SearchBot

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
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 OAI-SearchBot

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Robots.txt rules apply per host. Repeat them on each subdomain you want covered.

Should you block OAI-SearchBot on a local business site or a Shopify store?

Of OpenAI's bots, this is the one not to block by accident. Per OpenAI, a site that opts out is left out of ChatGPT search answers and can only appear as a navigational link.

Blocking gains you nothing I can find. If your robots.txt has a broad rule for every bot, or a firewall rule that challenges unknown traffic, check that OAI-SearchBot gets through.

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 OAI-SearchBot and the other bots in this directory.

The 12 bots, sorted by job

  1. OAI-SearchBot is in this group

    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. 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 OAI-SearchBot 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