Does GPTBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that GPTBot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.

How do I block GPTBot?

Add the GPTBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.

IPScanner

Training crawlers

GPTBot

GPTBot is a bot operated by OpenAI that collects pages used to train AI models. Data is used to train current and future models, removed paywalled data, PII and data that violates the company's policies. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be GPTBot can be checked against a published IP range file.

GPTBot at a glance

Reference data for the GPTBot crawler
User agent	`Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot`
Operator	OpenAI
Purpose	Scrapes data to train OpenAI's products.
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documented
Verification method	Published IP range file OpenAI publishes the GPTBot egress ranges as a JSON file. Match the request IP against that file; there is no reverse-DNS convention. https://openai.com/gptbot.json
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`GPTBot`
Operator documentation	https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

Data is used to train current and future models, removed paywalled data, PII and data that violates the company's policies.

robots.txt

Allow or block GPTBot

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block GPTBot

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow GPTBot

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking GPTBot keeps your pages out of the next training run. It does not remove anything already collected, and it has no effect on how the site ranks in ordinary search.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really GPTBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy GPTBot precisely because site owners allow it. OpenAI publishes the GPTBot egress ranges as a JSON file. Match the request IP against that file; there is no reverse-DNS convention.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

Other crawlers run by OpenAI

ChatGPT AgentAutonomous agents ChatGPT-UserAssistant fetchers OAI-SearchBotAI search crawlers OpenAIOther automated crawlers OperatorAutonomous agents

Related crawlers

ChatGPT AgentOpenAI · Autonomous agents ChatGPT-UserOpenAI · Assistant fetchers OAI-SearchBotOpenAI · AI search crawlers anthropic-aiAnthropic · Training crawlers Applebot-ExtendedApple · Training crawlers

Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ