ChatGPT-User
The fetcher ChatGPT uses when a user asks it to look at a specific page. A robots.txt rule here is a request, not a control.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| What it does | Fetches when a user asks |
| Obeys robots.txt | May bypass, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | ChatGPT Search |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
ChatGPT-User runs when a person pastes your URL into ChatGPT, or when a GPT Action reaches for your page. It is a live fetch on someone's behalf rather than a crawl.
OpenAI's own documentation states that robots.txt rules may not apply to user-initiated fetches. So a Disallow here records your preference; treat it as a signal rather than a switch. If a page must not be readable by anyone who has the URL, robots.txt was never the right layer for that.
The robots.txt rules
To block ChatGPT-User:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly — worth doing when your file also contains a blanket User-agent: * disallow, since the most specific matching group wins and a token with no group of its own falls back to the wildcard:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /If neither rule is present, ChatGPT-User is allowed. That is the default, and it is why an accidental block is nearly always something that was added rather than something that was forgotten — usually a snippet copied from a blog post that listed more tokens than the author intended to block.
Is it blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt is only the half you can read. A CDN or bot-management rule can turn ChatGPT-User away while your file still says it is welcome, and that mismatch is invisible from the front of the site. We check both layers separately and tell you which one is doing what.
We request two things: your robots.txt and your homepage. No other pages, ever.
Official sources
- OpenAI’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges — the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from OpenAI
Other OpenAI tokens
- GPTBot — Model training
- OAI-SearchBot — Search & citations