ChatGPT-User
OpenAI · Live retrieval · robots.txt token chatgpt-user
3% of 30,177 measured domains disallow chatgpt-user in robots.txt at the site root. Separately, and independently of robots.txt, 17.4% of 30,187 reachable domains refuse an AI crawler user agent at the network edge on two consecutive probes from different locations - a refusal the site's own robots.txt does not declare and its owner often has not chosen.
Measured 2026-10-06 by direct request to every domain in the corpus. Method: how this is measured. Reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.
Cite as: Crawl Census, "ChatGPT-User blocking rate", measured 2026-10-06. https://crawlcensus.com/bot/chatgpt-user
What it is definition
Fetches a page when a ChatGPT user or GPT Action asks for it; user-initiated, so robots rules may not apply.
ChatGPT-User is operated by OpenAI and classified here as live retrieval. These agents fetch a single URL because a user asked about it. Disallowing one means the assistant answers from an older copy or from someone else's summary instead of the live page. Several are documented as not bound by robots.txt, because the request is user-initiated rather than a crawl.
Disallowing chatgpt-user stops the fetch that happens when a user asks ChatGPT browsing about one of your URLs. The answer still gets written, from an older copy or from a third party's description of the page, and you no longer control what it says.
- robots.txt token
- chatgpt-user
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Purpose
- Live retrieval
- Honors robots.txt
- yes
- Documentation
- https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Identity on the wire exact string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/botcurl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot' https://example.com/Replace the host with your own. A 403, a challenge page or an empty body means the edge is blocking the agent whatever robots.txt says.
How to allow it, how to block it robots.txt
User-agent: chatgpt-user
Allow: /Absent any rule, the agent is already allowed, so this group only matters when your * group disallows something. Naming the agent replaces the * group for it entirely, so repeat here every disallow you still want to apply to it.
User-agent: chatgpt-user
Disallow: /Disallowing chatgpt-user stops the fetch that happens when a user asks ChatGPT browsing about one of your URLs. The answer still gets written, from an older copy or from a third party's description of the page, and you no longer control what it says.
Sites that block it 60 shown
See every measured domain that blocks ChatGPT-User
This list is served from a cache rebuilt just now. It is discarded the moment a rescan records a policy change for this agent, so a site that has just changed its robots.txt will drop off it within one scan rather than waiting for the cache to expire.
Compare OpenAI
OpenAI runs 4 agents in this registry, and they do different jobs. Blocking one says nothing about the others.
Common questions answered
Does blocking ChatGPT-User remove me from ChatGPT browsing?
Partly. ChatGPT-User fetches a page only when a user asks about it, so disallowing it does not delist you from ChatGPT browsing. It does mean the answer is composed without your live page, from a stale copy or a third-party summary.
How do I verify ChatGPT-User requests are genuine?
OpenAI publishes the address ranges its crawlers fetch from as JSON files linked from its bot documentation, one file per agent. Compare the source address of the request against the file for that agent. There is no reverse DNS name to check, so the address list is the only signal.
Check your own site free
See whether your robots.txt admits ChatGPT-User today, and whether your edge agrees with it.