OAI-AdsBot: what it does, and what blocking it means
OpenAI's ad-review fetcher. It only visits pages you submitted as a ChatGPT ad, so blocking it breaks your own campaigns rather than your visibility.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| What it does | Reference |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | Other AI assistants |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 2 September 2026 |
| Next review | 2 December 2026. We re-check every entry against the operator’s documentation each quarter. |
What happens if you block OAI-AdsBot?
Blocking it affects
- Review of the landing pages you submit as ChatGPT ads
It does not affect
- ChatGPT search answers and citations
- OpenAI model training
Should you block OAI-AdsBot?
OAI-AdsBot checks that a landing page submitted as a ChatGPT ad meets OpenAI's policies, and reads it to judge when the ad is relevant. It does not crawl: if you have never run an ad, it has never visited you.
It matters here for one reason. "Block all the OpenAI bots" snippets now list this token too, so a site running ChatGPT ads can paste one and find its ads failing review with nothing connecting the two. The robots.txt edit and the rejected campaign are weeks and departments apart.
OpenAI says this content is not used to train foundation models. If training is what you want to prevent, GPTBot is the token that does it, and blocking this one buys you nothing.
How do you spot OAI-AdsBot in your logs?
To find OAI-AdsBot in your logs, match the User-Agent shown on this page. The robots.txt token is what the crawler reads, not what appears in the request.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbotAnyone can send that User-Agent, so treat it as a claim. OpenAI's published IP ranges are the stronger way to verify the request.
How do you block or allow OAI-AdsBot in robots.txt?
To block OAI-AdsBot:
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly, use an Allow: / rule if your file has a blanket User-agent: * disallow:
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /With neither rule, OAI-AdsBot is allowed by default.
Not sure how OAI-AdsBot fits with the others? Build the whole file, or see which AI crawlers to allow.
Is your site blocking OAI-AdsBot?
A CDN or bot-management rule can still block OAI-AdsBot even when robots.txt says it is welcome. You cannot see that mismatch from the front of the site.
We request your robots.txt and homepage. We read your sitemap only when robots.txt hides pages from a crawler and we need to measure how much is affected. No other page.
Official sources
- OpenAI’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges is the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from OpenAI
How is OAI-AdsBot different from OpenAI’s other crawlers?
| OAI-AdsBot | GPTBot | OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT-User | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Its job | Reference | Model training | Search & citations | Fetches when a user asks |
| Blocking it affects | Review of the landing pages you submit as ChatGPT ads | OpenAI model training | ChatGPT search answers and citations | ChatGPT opening your page when someone asks it to (a request, not a control) |
| Blocking it leaves alone | ChatGPT search answers and citations; OpenAI model training | ChatGPT search answers and citations | OpenAI model training | ChatGPT search results; OpenAI model training |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, per its operator's docs | Yes, per its operator's docs | Yes, per its operator's docs | May bypass, per its operator's docs |
| Verifiable by IP | Yes, ranges are published | Yes, ranges are published | Yes, ranges are published | Yes, ranges are published |
| Last verified | 2 September 2026 | 2 September 2026 | 2 September 2026 | 2 September 2026 |
Which other crawlers do the same job as OAI-AdsBot?
- Googlebot: Reference, run by Google
- meta-externalads: Reference, run by Meta
- facebookexternalhit: Reference, run by Meta
- Bingbot: Reference, run by Microsoft