OAI-SearchBot

Search crawler

OpenAI's crawler for its search index. Seen on 108 of 135 sites in 13 weeks.

OAI-SearchBot reached 76 of 92 sites last week

Sites that got at least one OAI-SearchBot request each week, against every site reporting that week.

75%78%76%69%84%73%71%79%77%82%81%82%83%

Reach84%1st of 2687 of 104 sitesLast 4 weeks

Requests4.3M11% of all crawler requests13 weeks, 108 sites

Per site246a weekMedian where it visitsLast 4 weeks

Pages a visit9.5GPTBot reads 60.5Snapshot, 1 Feb 2026

How OAI-SearchBot reads a site

87,155 OAI-SearchBot visits to 64 brand sites. Snapshot, 1 Feb 2026.

Depth

56%

of its visits land two folders deep, like /blog/post. Only 0% touch the homepage.

When

+41%

more visits on a weekend day than a weekday. Busiest hour 21:00 UTC, quietest 13:00.

Blocking OAI-SearchBot can keep your pages out of ChatGPT answers.

OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot follows robots.txt. A rule changes future crawls, not pages it already collected.

Block OAI-SearchBot

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Allow OAI-SearchBot

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User agent

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/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot

Is it really OAI-SearchBot?

Anyone can send the OAI-SearchBot name. Here is how to check a request that carries it.

How to check

1Match the IP to OpenAI's listOpenAI publishes OAI-SearchBot's addresses at openai.com/searchbot.json.

2Read the user agent closelyOne common fake opens a bracket after Mozilla/5.0 and never closes it.

See every fake crawler

Common questions

What is OAI-SearchBot?

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler. OpenAI search crawler for indexing pages that can appear in ChatGPT search results.

How do I block OAI-SearchBot?

Add a directive to your robots.txt: "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /". OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot follows robots.txt. A rule changes future crawls, not pages it already collected.

Does blocking OAI-SearchBot hide me from AI?

No single bot rule hides a site from every AI product. Disallowing OAI-SearchBot can reduce search discovery and citation eligibility. Allowing it does not guarantee indexing, ranking, or citation.