ChatGPT-User

What ChatGPT-User does

Fetches a page when someone using ChatGPT, or a custom GPT, asks about it or clicks through to it. It acts for one person, in real time, so it's the closest thing to a customer visiting through ChatGPT.

As an AI assistant, it fetches pages for a person, in real time, while they use an AI assistant. The kinds of AI agent that visit websites.

Should you allow it?

Almost always allow it. Blocking it means the assistant can't read your pages when a customer asks about you, so it answers from somewhere else. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.

How to allow or block ChatGPT-User

ChatGPT-User reads the ChatGPT-User group in your robots.txt. To block it everywhere:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

To allow it everywhere, even if another rule blocks other bots:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

Robots.txt is a request, not a lock: well-behaved crawlers follow it, impostors don't. Robots.txt for AI agents.

How it identifies itself

A typical user agent:

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

How to tell if it's really ChatGPT-User

You can check a request that claims to be ChatGPT-User against what OpenAI publishes:

• IP ranges: openai.com/chatgpt-user.json

Requests that use the name but fail these checks are impostors, usually scrapers trying to get past bot protection. Ghost Agent Lab checks every request this way and gives you rules to block impostors. How to verify AI crawlers.

Other agents from OpenAI

• OAI-SearchBot: AI and search crawler
• GPTBot: AI training crawler
• ChatGPT Agent: autonomous agent

Every OpenAI agent, and a robots.txt for all of them →