OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI's crawler for surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that block it are left out of ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search — ChatGPT search |
| robots.txt token | OAI-SearchBot |
| 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 |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the publisher |
| Official IP ranges | https://openai.com/searchbot.json — 39 ranges, list dated 2026-01-02 |
| Reverse DNS | Not documented |
| Official documentation | https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots |
Live activity of OAI-SearchBot
No visit from OAI-SearchBot recorded on iabig.com over the last 30 days.
Last updated: 2026-10-25 14:07:01 UTC. See the Observatory
What OAI-SearchBot does
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler. It is used to surface websites, with a link to the source, in the search features of ChatGPT.
What OpenAI states:
- Sites that disallow
OAI-SearchBotare not shown in ChatGPT search answers, although they can still appear as navigational links. - To appear in search results, OpenAI recommends allowing
OAI-SearchBotin robots.txt and accepting requests from its published IP ranges. - A robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to be reflected in search.
- Its setting is independent of
GPTBot, but if both are allowed, a single crawl may serve both purposes. - When fetching robots.txt, the user-agent string may carry an extra
robots.txtmarker.
Unlike GPTBot's, the published string mimics Chrome on macOS before the OAI-SearchBot/1.4 token, and the version number may change. Match on the token, not on the whole string.
OpenAI also notes that ChatGPT-User is not used to decide whether content can appear in search: OAI-SearchBot is the token that governs ChatGPT search visibility and automatic crawling. Requests can be authenticated against the bot's own JSON file of IP ranges; no reverse DNS hostname is documented.
Block or allow OAI-SearchBot
Your pages drop out of ChatGPT search answers, except possibly as navigational links. Of OpenAI's tokens, this is the one whose blocking costs the most visibility.
To block it, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (copy any private rules you have):
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /A group naming OAI-SearchBot replaces the User-agent: * group for it. Build a complete robots.txt with the generator and check it with the tester.
Verify a OAI-SearchBot visit
Anyone can write “OAI-SearchBot” in a User-Agent. Paste the IP address and User-Agent from your logs into the IP verifier to know whether the visit is genuine.
Other OpenAI crawlers
- GPTBot — Training
- ChatGPT-User — Browsing