What it does
GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler. Content is copied into datasets used to train foundation models. Blocking costs you nothing in traffic today; allowing is a donation of your content to model weights with no citation or referral in return.
Full UA: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot. robots.txt fetches may carry an extra 'robots.txt' marker in the UA. Robots compliance field-confirmed on our own properties (a production site we operate 2026-07-01: hammering stopped within one crawl cycle of a Disallow).
How to verify a hit is really GPTBot
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://openai.com/gptbot.json (fetched live 2026-08-22)
Strongest available check: the vendor publishes the crawler's egress IPs. Fetch the list, then confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a UA match from any other IP is a spoofer.
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Full step-by-step method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token GPTBot in robots.txt:
# Block GPTBot site-wide
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow GPTBot
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide. robots.txt governs whether GPTBot may fetch; llms.txt is the separate, curated map AI assistants read once allowed in.
Vendor documentation: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
The OpenAI family
OpenAI operates 4 distinct tokens in this roster, and they do not block each other: a robots.txt line for GPTBot does nothing to its siblings — each needs its own User-agent: entry (the robots.txt guide has combined patterns).
| Token | Role | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | AI search | honors robots.txt |
| ChatGPT-User | User action | claims robots compliance |
| OAI-AdsBot | User action | claims robots compliance |
Frequently asked questions
What is GPTBot?
GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler. Content is copied into datasets used to train foundation models. Blocking costs you nothing in traffic today; allowing is a donation of your content to model weights with no citation or referral in return.
Does GPTBot respect robots.txt?
Yes — OpenAI documents robots.txt compliance for GPTBot (vendor docs reviewed July 2026).
How do I block GPTBot?
Add 'User-agent: GPTBot' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.
How do I verify GPTBot traffic by IP?
Fetch OpenAI's published IP list for GPTBot and confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a GPTBot user-agent from any other IP is a spoofer.
Related bots
Same vendor, then other training crawlers — the full directory profiles all 34.