OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot indexes the web for ChatGPT search. Here is what it does, its documented user-agent string, and how to allow or block it in robots.txt.
What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for ChatGPT's search features. It surfaces and links to websites in ChatGPT's search results and is not used to train models. Opting out means your site will not appear in ChatGPT search answers.
These bots index your site for AI-powered search engines that cite and link back to you. Blocking them makes you invisible exactly where a growing number of people now ask their questions.
The OAI-SearchBot user-agent string
This is the user-agent string OpenAI documents for OAI-SearchBot. You will see it in your server logs when the bot visits.
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/1.3; +https://openai.com/searchbot
How do I block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt?
Add one of these snippets to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. An explicit group for OAI-SearchBot overrides your User-agent: * rules for this bot.
Block OAI-SearchBot
Tells OAI-SearchBot it may not access any page on your site.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /
Allow OAI-SearchBot
Explicitly allows OAI-SearchBot, even when a broad Disallow rule blocks other bots.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: /
Does OAI-SearchBot respect robots.txt?
Yes. OpenAI presents robots.txt as the way to manage search inclusion: allow or disallow the OAI-SearchBot token to control whether your pages can appear in ChatGPT's search results.
Should you block OAI-SearchBot?
Think twice before blocking OAI-SearchBot. Unlike GPTBot it does not train models — it is how ChatGPT finds and links to your site in search answers. Blocking it removes you from a fast-growing discovery surface while giving you no privacy benefit that GPTBot's block does not already provide.
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:
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/botsWhat does your robots.txt say about OAI-SearchBot?
Run your domain through our free checker to see whether OAI-SearchBot — and 13 other AI crawlers — may access your site right now.