OAI-SearchBot

Operator

OpenAI

Type

AI Search Crawler

Official page

developers.openai.com

robots.txt token

OAI-SearchBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

Published IP ranges

openai.com/searchbot.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features.

OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.

OpenAI

User agent

Requests from OAI-SearchBot carry user agents like these:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot

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/1.0; robots.txt; +https://openai.com/searchbot

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

OAI-SearchBot

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 OAI-SearchBot

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-SearchBot
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.

we recommend allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site’s robots.txt file and allowing requests from our published IP ranges below.

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

Sites that opt out won't show in ChatGPT search answers but can still appear as navigational links. robots.txt changes take about 24 hours.

Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.

OpenAI

How Vireo counts OAI-SearchBot

Vireo keeps requests from OAI-SearchBot 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 OAI-SearchBot's user agents.

Sources

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