What is GPTBot?
GPTBot is OpenAI's AI training crawler. Training crawlers collect pages that may be used to train or improve AI models.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Purpose (operator wording) | training |
| robots.txt token | GPTBot |
| User agent string | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes |
| IP ranges | https://openai.com/gptbot.json |
| Last verified |
What else should I know about GPTBot?
What is the GPTBot user agent string?
This is the user agent string OpenAI documents for GPTBot, as of October 29, 2026. Version numbers and details can change, so match on the token in robots.txt, not on the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotHow do I block GPTBot in robots.txt?
Add this group to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. It asks GPTBot to stay out of every page.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly, for example while a broader rule blocks other bots:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /How do I opt out of OpenAI training but stay in its search?
Each OpenAI user agent has its own token, so you can set them one by one. This file blocks GPTBot and allows OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User. Every line comes from the rows in this dataset. Whether allowing a bot keeps you in a product is OpenAI's call, so check each crawler's page. OpenAI says ChatGPT-User may not follow robots.txt.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /Does blocking GPTBot affect AI answers?
OpenAI says GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot settings are independent. A site can disallow GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in ChatGPT search. Whether blocking GPTBot affects other OpenAI answers: not stated.
Each other OpenAI user agent has its own robots.txt token, so a rule for GPTBot does not cover them. See the related crawlers below.
Does GPTBot follow robots.txt?
Yes. OpenAI docs: 'Disallowing GPTBot indicates a site's content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models.' OpenAI states each robots.txt setting is independent.
Robots.txt is a request, not a lock (RFC 9309).
What IP addresses does GPTBot use?
OpenAI publishes a list at https://openai.com/gptbot.json. We did not download or parse it. A request that claims to be GPTBot but comes from outside that list is not GPTBot.
Which other OpenAI crawlers are there?
What should I read next?
Next: give AI tools something to quote
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