OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT's search feature (ChatGPT Search). It isn't used to train models: its job is to index your site so it can appear linked in search-backed ChatGPT answers. For a small business, it's the AI-era equivalent of Googlebot — if it doesn't index you, you don't show up in results.
- User-agent
OAI-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/1.3; +https://openai.com/searchbot- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Yes
- Official documentation
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block OAI-SearchBot?
No. Blocking it is like asking ChatGPT not to show your site in its search results. It's the equivalent of voluntarily deindexing yourself from Google: your competitors will take that spot.
Does OAI-SearchBot use my content to train the AI?
No. OpenAI explicitly separates it from GPTBot: OAI-SearchBot is only used to show and link websites in ChatGPT search results, not for model training.
How do I know if OAI-SearchBot visits my site?
Check your server or CDN logs for "OAI-SearchBot". If it shows up regularly, your site is being indexed for ChatGPT search.