What it does
OAI-AdsBot 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.
Validates advertiser-submitted landing pages for ChatGPT ads safety — fetches only URLs an advertiser submitted, never a general crawl. Neither training nor search; filed under user-action as the closest bucket (the fetch is human-initiated, just by the advertiser rather than a chat user). New token since our 2026-07-19 snapshot.
Full UA: not captured in our July 2026 roster review — match log hits on the token OAI-AdsBot (case-insensitive substring) and verify by IP before acting.
How to verify a hit is really OAI-AdsBot
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://openai.com/adsbot.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 OAI-AdsBot in robots.txt:
# Block OAI-AdsBot site-wide
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow OAI-AdsBot
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
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 OAI-AdsBot 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 OAI-AdsBot does nothing to its siblings — each needs its own User-agent: entry (the robots.txt guide has combined patterns).
| Token | Role | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | Training | honors robots.txt |
| OAI-SearchBot | AI search | honors robots.txt |
| ChatGPT-User | User action | claims robots compliance |
Frequently asked questions
What is OAI-AdsBot?
OAI-AdsBot 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 OAI-AdsBot respect robots.txt?
OpenAI claims OAI-AdsBot respects robots.txt, but compliance is not independently confirmed.
How do I block OAI-AdsBot?
Add 'User-agent: OAI-AdsBot' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.
How do I verify OAI-AdsBot traffic by IP?
Fetch OpenAI's published IP list for OAI-AdsBot and confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a OAI-AdsBot user-agent from any other IP is a spoofer.
Related bots
Same vendor, then other user-action fetchers — the full directory profiles all 34.