OAI-SearchBot: the crawler behind ChatGPT search results

Operator

OpenAI

robots.txt token

OAI-SearchBot

User agents

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/searchbotMozilla/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; robots.txt; +https://openai.com/searchbot

Purpose

AI search indexing

Honours robots.txt

Its operator documents robots.txt as the control

Published IP ranges

https://openai.com/searchbot.json

Reverse DNS

None documented

Official documentation

OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers

Verified on

2026-10-05

What OAI-SearchBot does

OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features, and names it as the token for managing search opt-outs and automatic crawling. [1]

OpenAI labels the first user agent an example whose version number may change, and says it may use the second, which carries a robots.txt marker, when fetching robots.txt files, so those requests can be told apart in server logs. [1]

Allow or block OAI-SearchBot 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).

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

What blocking OAI-SearchBot changes

OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. [1]

OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours from a robots.txt update for its systems to adjust. [1]

The setting is independent of GPTBot. OpenAI gives the example of a site that allows OAI-SearchBot to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot to indicate that its content should not be used for training. [1]

How to verify a request really is OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI publishes OAI-SearchBot's IP addresses as a JSON list and recommends allowing requests from them for sites that want to appear in search. A firewall or bot-protection rule that blocks those addresses works against that, whatever robots.txt says. OpenAI documents no reverse-DNS hostname. [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.