OpenAI

OAI-SearchBot

If GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are both allowed, OpenAI says it may use one crawl for both purposes.

Class: Search index
robots.txt: Says it honours robots.txt; Disallowing it removes you from ChatGPT search answers, in about 24 hours.
Evidence: Confirmed from operator documentation; Source

Published 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

Proving it is real

Check the IP against OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot file.

Check an address now.

Blocking it

robots.txt

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Cloudflare custom rule expression

(http.user_agent contains "OAI-SearchBot")

nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "OAI-SearchBot") {
    return 403;
}

Matching a name only blocks bots that tell the truth about it. Before you do this, read what each decision costs.

Last reviewed Nov 2, 2026