What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler. Search crawlers build the index a search or answer product draws on.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Purpose (operator wording) | search index |
| robots.txt token | OAI-SearchBot |
| User agent string | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes |
| IP ranges | https://openai.com/searchbot.json |
| Last verified |
What else should I know about OAI-SearchBot?
What is the OAI-SearchBot user agent string?
This is the user agent string OpenAI documents for OAI-SearchBot, 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 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbotHow do I block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt?
Add this group to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. It asks OAI-SearchBot to stay out of every page.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly, for example while a broader rule blocks other bots:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
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 OAI-SearchBot affect AI answers?
OpenAI: 'Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.'
Each other OpenAI user agent has its own robots.txt token, so a rule for OAI-SearchBot does not cover them. See the related crawlers below.
Does OAI-SearchBot follow robots.txt?
Yes. OpenAI docs list OAI-SearchBot as a robots.txt tag for managing search appearance; robots.txt changes can take ~24 hours to take effect.
Robots.txt is a request, not a lock (RFC 9309).
What IP addresses does OAI-SearchBot use?
OpenAI publishes a list at https://openai.com/searchbot.json. We did not download or parse it. A request that claims to be OAI-SearchBot but comes from outside that list is not OAI-SearchBot.
Which other OpenAI crawlers are there?
What should I read next?
Next: give AI tools something to quote
Paperboy writes articles that answer the questions your buyers ask, with every fact linked to its source, FAQ and Article structured data, and publishes them to your site every week. Your first article is free.