OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI's retrieval crawler that fetches pages for ChatGPT search — block it and you're invisible to ChatGPT.
Definition
OAI-SearchBot is the user-agent OpenAI uses to fetch web pages when ChatGPT performs a live search to answer a question. Separate from GPTBot (training) and ChatGPT-User (on-demand). Blocking OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt removes your site from ChatGPT search results — even if GPTBot is allowed.
When to use
Allow OAI-SearchBot for any site you want ChatGPT to be able to cite. This is the crawler that controls real-time visibility in ChatGPT answers.
See also
- GPTBot — OpenAI's web crawler for future model training data — does not affect ChatGPT live retrieval.
- ChatGPT — OpenAI's consumer LLM product — chat, browse, and run plugins on the web via GPT-class models.
- robots.txt — Plain text file at /robots.txt that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch.