Does OpenAI respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that OpenAI 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 OpenAI?

Add the OpenAI 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

Other automated crawlers

OpenAI

OpenAI is a bot that crawls the web automatically. The purpose of this bot is unclear at this time but it is a member of OpenAI's suite of crawlers. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be OpenAI can be checked against a published IP range file.

OpenAI at a glance

Reference data for the OpenAI crawler
User agent	`OpenAI` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	OpenAI
Purpose	Other automated crawlers
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documented
Verification method	Published IP range file A bare "OpenAI" token is not one of the three documented crawlers. Treat it as unverified unless the source IP appears in one of the published OpenAI range files. https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`OpenAI`
Operator documentation	https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

The purpose of this bot is unclear at this time but it is a member of OpenAI's suite of crawlers.

robots.txt

Allow or block OpenAI

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 OpenAI

User-agent: OpenAI
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow OpenAI

User-agent: OpenAI
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: OpenAI
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 OpenAI stops this specific token. Check your logs afterwards, because operators that ignore robots.txt often come back under a different name.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really OpenAI?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy OpenAI precisely because site owners allow it. A bare "OpenAI" token is not one of the three documented crawlers. Treat it as unverified unless the source IP appears in one of the published OpenAI range files.

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 GPTBotTraining crawlers OAI-SearchBotAI search crawlers OperatorAutonomous agents

Related crawlers

ChatGPT AgentOpenAI · Autonomous agents ChatGPT-UserOpenAI · Assistant fetchers GPTBotOpenAI · Training crawlers facebookexternalhitMeta/Facebook · Other automated crawlers BuddyBotBuddyBotLearning · Other automated 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