AI crawlers / OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI · ChatGPT search · Discovery / citation crawler
OpenAI's crawler for surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search results. Allow it to be eligible for citations and links in ChatGPT search.
At a glance
Affects live AI answersYes
Affects search inclusion,
Used for model trainingNo
robots.txt tokenOAI-SearchBot
Source confidencedocumented · verified 2026-09-04
Allow it, this crawler decides whether you can be cited in this engine’s answers.
What OAI-SearchBot is
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to surface websites in the search features of ChatGPT. OpenAI's documentation states it is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features."
If you block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, your pages are not eligible to appear or be cited in ChatGPT search answers. This is the crawler to allow if being cited by ChatGPT matters to you.
OAI-SearchBot is distinct from GPTBot, which is for model training, and from ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page only when a person asks about it. Allowing OAI-SearchBot does not, on its own, opt you into model training.
Controlling OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt
Add the matching group to the robots.txt at your site root.
Allow OAI-SearchBot:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Block OAI-SearchBot:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Check what your live site actually allows with the Robots.txt + AI-Bot Tester.
Source
Verified on 2026-09-04 against OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. Confidence: documented, stated in the vendor’s own documentation.
The next question
Your page is AI-ready. But does AI actually cite you?
Being crawlable is step one. The AI Visibility Checker shows whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini name and cite your brand, and who they name instead.
Keep going