What it does
ChatGPT-User is OpenAI's user action crawler. A live fetch made because a human asked the assistant about your page right now. Closest thing to a real visitor; several of these (Perplexity-User, meta-externalfetcher) ignore robots.txt by design because the request is user-initiated.
Fires when a ChatGPT user or Custom GPT visits a page on demand. Full UA: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
How to verify a hit is really ChatGPT-User
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json (fetched live 2026-07-19)
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Confirm the source IP belongs to OpenAI — published IP-range JSON where available, otherwise RDAP/rDNS on the IP. Full method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token ChatGPT-User in robots.txt:
# Block ChatGPT-User site-wide
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide.
Vendor documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Frequently asked questions
What is ChatGPT-User?
ChatGPT-User is OpenAI's user action crawler. A live fetch made because a human asked the assistant about your page right now. Closest thing to a real visitor; several of these (Perplexity-User, meta-externalfetcher) ignore robots.txt by design because the request is user-initiated.
Does ChatGPT-User respect robots.txt?
OpenAI claims ChatGPT-User respects robots.txt, but compliance is not independently confirmed.
How do I block ChatGPT-User?
Add 'User-agent: ChatGPT-User' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.