GPTBot

OpenAI · Training crawler

GPTBot is OpenAI’s training crawler — it crawls the web to collect content for model training. Blocking it opts your content out of future models but does not affect live answers.

User-agent string

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot

Source: vendor-documented at developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots.

Does GPTBot respect robots.txt?

Controllable via robots.txt. OpenAI’s wording: “Disallowing GPTBot indicates a site’s content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models.”

Allow or block GPTBot

# Allow (recommended if you want GPTBot traffic)
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

# Block
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Verifying it’s really GPTBot

OpenAI publishes GPTBot IP ranges at openai.com/gptbot.json. User-agent strings can be spoofed by anyone — identity claims are only trustworthy when the source IP matches the operator’s published ranges.

What site owners should know

2026 robots.txt surveys consistently rank GPTBot the most-blocked AI crawler (CCBot rivals or exceeds it among news publishers) — but note what blocking does and does not do: it opts you out of training; it does not remove you from ChatGPT search answers (that’s OAI-SearchBot) or stop live user fetches (ChatGPT-User).

Scan your site to see how your robots.txt, content negotiation, and discovery files treat AI agents — including whether you’re blocking agents you meant to allow. Background: the robots.txt guide and agent readiness.

All AI agent user-agents

ClaudeBot · Claude-User · Claude-SearchBot · GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT-User · PerplexityBot · Perplexity-User · Google-Extended · Google-Agent · Meta-ExternalAgent