ChatGPT-User

What is ChatGPT-User?

ChatGPT-User is OpenAI's user-triggered fetcher. It fires when a ChatGPT user, a Custom GPT, or a GPT Action asks the assistant to visit a specific page. It is not a bulk crawler and is not used for training.

These bots fetch a page live when someone asks an AI assistant about it. Blocking them means assistants like ChatGPT and Claude cannot read or cite your pages on demand.

The ChatGPT-User user-agent string

This is the user-agent string OpenAI documents for ChatGPT-User. You will see it in your server logs when the bot visits.

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

How do I block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt?

Add one of these snippets to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. An explicit group for ChatGPT-User overrides your User-agent: * rules for this bot.

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

Does ChatGPT-User respect robots.txt?

Not guaranteed. OpenAI explicitly warns that robots.txt may not apply to ChatGPT-User: “Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.” You can still add a User-agent: ChatGPT-User group, but OpenAI does not promise it is honored.

Should you block ChatGPT-User?

There is little reason to block ChatGPT-User for most sites: it only fetches a page when one of your visitors, through ChatGPT, explicitly asks about it — much like a person opening your page in a browser. Blocking it mainly stops assistants from reading your public content on a user's behalf.

Official documentation

The facts on this page come from OpenAI's bot documentation. Bot behavior changes — when in doubt, the operator's page is the source of truth: