OAI-SearchBot
Stated to honor robots.txtOAI-SearchBot crawls and indexes pages specifically to power ChatGPT's search feature's live, cited answers — a distinct job from training, and the crawler most directly responsible for whether ChatGPT can cite your site in real time.
- User-agent
- OAI-SearchBot
- Operator
- OpenAI
Allow in robots.txt
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Block in robots.txt
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Most brands doing GEO want this one allowed even if they block GPTBot, since it's the crawler that drives real-time citations rather than long-term training inclusion.
Why OAI-SearchBot matters more than GPTBot for near-term visibility
If your goal is showing up in a ChatGPT answer this month rather than in some future model version, OAI-SearchBot is the crawler to focus on. It powers ChatGPT's live web search, meaning a page it can access and parse today can be cited in an answer today, without waiting for a new model training cycle. This makes it functionally closer to a classic search crawler than GPTBot is, and worth checking on its own terms rather than folding it into a general 'OpenAI' allow-or-block decision.