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OpenAI · Search indexes

OAI-SearchBot

Surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.

robots.txt name
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
Category
Search indexes: Crawl the web to build the index of a search engine or AI search.
Follows robots.txt
Yes
Official documentation
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
Published IP ranges
https://openai.com/searchbot.json

Checked against the official documentation on October 17, 2026.

Block or allow it in robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. To block it everywhere:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

To allow it everywhere except one folder:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /private/

Is it really this bot?

Anyone can copy a user agent. To be sure a request comes from OpenAI, compare its IP address with the ranges the company publishes.

Other bots from OpenAI

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