OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI · Answer index · robots.txt token oai-searchbot
2% of 30,177 measured domains disallow oai-searchbot in robots.txt at the site root. Separately, and independently of robots.txt, 10.5% of 30,183 reachable domains refuse a request carrying this exact user agent at the network edge - a refusal the site's 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, "OAI-SearchBot blocking rate", measured 2026-10-06. https://crawlcensus.com/bot/oai-searchbot
What it is definition
Indexes pages so they can be surfaced and cited in ChatGPT search results, not for training.
OAI-SearchBot is operated by OpenAI and classified here as answer index. These agents build the index an answer engine queries at question time. Disallowing one removes the site from those answers and from the citations that link back to it. Training is governed by separate tokens, so this is the expensive block, not the protective one.
Disallowing oai-searchbot removes the site from the index ChatGPT search queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.
- robots.txt token
- oai-searchbot
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Purpose
- Answer index
- Honors robots.txt
- yes
- Documentation
- https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Identity on the wire exact string
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/searchbotcurl -A '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' 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: oai-searchbot
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: oai-searchbot
Disallow: /Disallowing oai-searchbot removes the site from the index ChatGPT search queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.
Sites that block it 60 shown
See every measured domain that blocks OAI-SearchBot
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 OAI-SearchBot remove me from ChatGPT search?
Yes, in effect. OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT search reads at question time, so disallowing it takes the site out of those answers and out of the citations that link back to it. This is the block that costs traffic.
How do I verify OAI-SearchBot 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 OAI-SearchBot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.