GPTBot
OpenAI's training crawler. Blocking it keeps your pages out of future OpenAI models — and does nothing at all to whether ChatGPT can cite you.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| What it does | Model training |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | AI model training |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
GPTBot is the token most people reach for when they want to "block AI", and it is usually the wrong one to worry about. It collects content for training future models. It is not the crawler behind ChatGPT's search answers.
Blocking it is a legitimate policy choice with no search cost. If your intent was to stay out of training data, this is the correct token and you can stop here. If your intent was to control whether ChatGPT recommends you, you want OAI-SearchBot instead — and you almost certainly want to allow that one.
The robots.txt rules
To block GPTBot:
User-agent: GPTBot
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: GPTBot
Allow: /If neither rule is present, GPTBot 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 GPTBot 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
- OAI-SearchBot — Search & citations
- ChatGPT-User — Fetches when a user asks