ChatGPT-User

Operator

OpenAI

Type

AI Assistant

Official page

developers.openai.com

robots.txt token

ChatGPT-User

Follows robots.txt

Partly, according to OpenAI.

Published IP ranges

openai.com/chatgpt-user.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Visits pages when a ChatGPT or Custom GPT user's request needs it. It isn't an automatic crawler.

When users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question, it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent.

OpenAI

Crawl frequency, per ai.robots.txt: Only when prompted by a user.

User agent

Requests from ChatGPT-User carry a user agent like this:

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

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

ChatGPT-User

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow ChatGPT-User

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.

OpenAI

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

User-initiated, so robots.txt may not apply. It isn't used to decide what appears in ChatGPT search; OpenAI points to OAI-SearchBot for that.

ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search. Please use OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt for managing Search opt outs and automatic crawl.

OpenAI

How Vireo counts ChatGPT-User

Vireo keeps requests from ChatGPT-User out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over ChatGPT-User's user agents.

Sources

• OpenAI: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• ChatGPT-User information page (platform.openai.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)