What it does
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's ai search crawler. An AI search index that can cite and link your pages in answers (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search, Alexa, Siri). Blocking removes you from those answer surfaces — for most sites these are wanted crawlers.
Powers ChatGPT search citations; not used for foundation-model training. ~24h for robots.txt changes to take effect. NOT substring-matched by 'GPTBot' patterns — separate token.
Full UA: not captured in our July 2026 roster review — match log hits on the token OAI-SearchBot (case-insensitive substring) and verify by IP before acting.
How to verify a hit is really OAI-SearchBot
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://openai.com/searchbot.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 OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt:
# Block OAI-SearchBot site-wide
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
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 OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's ai search crawler. An AI search index that can cite and link your pages in answers (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search, Alexa, Siri). Blocking removes you from those answer surfaces — for most sites these are wanted crawlers.
Does OAI-SearchBot respect robots.txt?
Yes — OpenAI documents robots.txt compliance for OAI-SearchBot (vendor docs reviewed July 2026).
How do I block OAI-SearchBot?
Add 'User-agent: OAI-SearchBot' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.