Does Operator respect robots.txt?

Not documented. No operator statement says whether Operator reads robots.txt, so add the rule but verify in your logs that the requests actually stop.

How do I block Operator?

Add the Operator 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

Autonomous agents

Operator

Operator is a bot operated by OpenAI that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. Operator is an AI agent created by OpenAI that can use a web browser. Whether it honours robots.txt is undocumented, and a request claiming to be Operator can be checked against a published IP range file.

Operator at a glance

Reference data for the Operator crawler
User agent	`Operator` 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	Autonomous agents
Respects robots.txt	Not documented
Verification method	Published IP range file Browser-driving agent run on behalf of a signed-in user. OpenAI lists the matching egress range file in its bots documentation. https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`Operator`
Operator documentation	https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

Operator is an AI agent created by OpenAI that can use a web browser. It can intelligently navigate and interact with websites to complete multi-step tasks on behalf of a human user.

robots.txt

Allow or block Operator

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 Operator

User-agent: Operator
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow Operator

User-agent: Operator
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: Operator
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 Operator stops automated sessions that fill forms, click through flows and read pages the way a logged-in user would. Rate limits and challenges usually work better here than a robots.txt line.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really Operator?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Operator precisely because site owners allow it. Browser-driving agent run on behalf of a signed-in user. OpenAI lists the matching egress range file in its bots documentation.

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 OpenAIOther automated crawlers

Related crawlers

ChatGPT AgentOpenAI · Autonomous agents ChatGPT-UserOpenAI · Assistant fetchers GPTBotOpenAI · Training crawlers Claude-WebAnthropic · Autonomous agents Google-CloudVertexBotGoogle · Autonomous agents

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