OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is a bot operated by OpenAI that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Crawls sites to surface as results in SearchGPT. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be OAI-SearchBot can be checked against a published IP range file.
OAI-SearchBot at a glance
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot |
|---|---|
| Operator | OpenAI |
| Purpose | Search result generation. |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published IP range file OpenAI publishes a separate range file for the search crawler. Blocking it removes the site from ChatGPT search results, which is a different decision from blocking training. https://openai.com/searchbot.json |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | OAI-SearchBot |
| Operator documentation | https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots |
Crawls sites to surface as results in SearchGPT.
Allow or block OAI-SearchBot
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.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking OAI-SearchBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really OAI-SearchBot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy OAI-SearchBot precisely because site owners allow it. OpenAI publishes a separate range file for the search crawler. Blocking it removes the site from ChatGPT search results, which is a different decision from blocking training.
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.
Other crawlers run by OpenAI
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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.