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Agent directory · AI and search crawler

OAI-SearchBot

Crawls the web so ChatGPT can show and link to sites in its search results. OpenAI says it isn't used to train its models.

Run by
OpenAI
Type
AI and search crawler
Robots.txt name
OAI-SearchBot
Verifiable
Yes

What OAI-SearchBot does

Crawls the web so ChatGPT can show and link to sites in its search results. OpenAI says it isn't used to train its models.

As an AI and search crawler, it indexes pages so a search engine or AI search tool can find, cite and link to them. The kinds of AI agent that visit websites.

Should you allow it?

Allow it, unless you deliberately want to stay out of that search engine. Blocking it removes you from its results and answers. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.

How to allow or block OAI-SearchBot

OAI-SearchBot reads the OAI-SearchBot group in your robots.txt. To block it everywhere:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

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

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
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; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot

How to tell if it's really OAI-SearchBot

You can check a request that claims to be OAI-SearchBot against what OpenAI publishes:

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.

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

Does OAI-SearchBot visit your site? Ghost Agent Lab reads your CDN or server logs and shows every request from OAI-SearchBot and 1,566+ other known agents: what they read, what your site sent back, and whether each request was genuine. See agent traffic, or check whether AI agents can use your site for free.