OAI-AdsBot

Operator

OpenAI

robots.txt token

OAI-AdsBot

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

OAI-AdsBot visits the landing page of a page submitted as an ad on ChatGPT, to check it against OpenAI's policies and, per OpenAI, to "determine when it's most relevant to show the ad to users". OpenAI states it only visits pages submitted as ads and that the data is not used to train foundation models. Documented at https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Validates and targets ads on ChatGPT.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

Crawl frequency, per ai.robots.txt: Only when a page is submitted as an ad.

How to block or allow OAI-AdsBot

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: OAI-AdsBot
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.

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.

How Vireo counts OAI-AdsBot

When a request's user agent contains OAI-AdsBot, Vireo keeps it out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Other bots, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over the bot's name.

Sources

• ai.robots.txt (MIT)