ChatGPT-User: the agent ChatGPT sends when someone asks

Operator

OpenAI

robots.txt token

ChatGPT-User

User agent

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

Purpose

Fetches a page when a user asks

Honours robots.txt

Its operator says robots.txt may not apply

Published IP ranges

https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json

Reverse DNS

None documented

Official documentation

OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers

Verified on

2026-10-05

What ChatGPT-User does

For certain user actions in ChatGPT and custom GPTs, OpenAI uses ChatGPT-User: when someone asks a question, ChatGPT may visit a web page with this agent. OpenAI's description of it also covers GPT Actions, through which users may interact with external applications. [1]

OpenAI states that ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion. [1]

Allow or block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt

Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of each host (each scheme and port counts separately) it should apply to. A crawler that finds one or more groups naming its token follows those groups, merged into one, and ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat in them any * rules you still want applied (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1).

OpenAI says robots.txt may not govern ChatGPT-User, so the block group records a preference rather than a guarantee. The section below quotes the operator.

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

What blocking ChatGPT-User changes

Because these actions are initiated by a user, OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User. A Disallow line for it is therefore a stated preference rather than a dependable block. [1]

Search visibility sits elsewhere. OpenAI states that ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in search, and directs search opt-outs to OAI-SearchBot. [1]

How to verify a request really is ChatGPT-User

OpenAI publishes the IP addresses ChatGPT-User uses as a JSON list and gives the user agent above as its full string. A request claiming to be ChatGPT-User from outside this list does not come from a range OpenAI publishes for it. No reverse-DNS hostname is documented. [1][2]

A crawler policy is one part of being readable by assistants. The AI search readiness guide covers the rest, and robots.txt and crawl access covers the firewall and bot-protection rules that block crawlers before robots.txt is ever read. A full SEO report covers AI search readiness alongside the rest of a site's technical health.