ChatGPT-User: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What ChatGPT-User is
ChatGPT-User fetches a page because a person asked for it. They pasted your URL, or followed a link, and asked the assistant to read it. There is no crawl schedule and no training corpus involved. Blocking it means failing a visitor who explicitly asked for your page.
Operator: OpenAI
robots.txt token: ChatGPT-User
User-agent on the wire: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
Category: User-triggered fetch
What blocking it actually costs
When a user pastes your URL into ChatGPT and asks about it, the fetch fails. You are blocking a visitor who explicitly asked for your page.
How to block ChatGPT-User
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /
The token must appear on its own User-agent: line. A named group replaces the User-agent: * group rather than adding to it, so anything you also want disallowed for this crawler has to be repeated inside its group.
How to allow ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
An explicit allow is worth writing even when you have no blanket block: it documents the decision, and it survives someone later adding a restrictive User-agent: * rule without thinking about AI crawlers.
robots.txt is not the only thing that can block it
A permissive robots.txt does not mean ChatGPT-User can reach you. WAF rules, Cloudflare's bot-management settings, rate limits and country blocks all sit in front of robots.txt and answer first. A site whose robots.txt welcomes ChatGPT-User and whose edge returns 403 to it is blocked in every way that matters, and nothing in robots.txt will tell you so.
This is the gap the AI Crawler Access Checker was built to close: it reads robots.txt and sends a real request carrying the crawler's user-agent, so you see what the crawler sees.
Official documentation
OpenAI documents ChatGPT-User at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots.
Common questions
- What user-agent does ChatGPT-User send?
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot- How do I block ChatGPT-User?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /The group must name
ChatGPT-Useron its own line. AUser-agent: *group does not combine with a named one. Under RFC 9309, the most specific matching group replaces the wildcard entirely, it does not inherit from it.- What does blocking ChatGPT-User cost me?
When a user pastes your URL into ChatGPT and asks about it, the fetch fails. You are blocking a visitor who explicitly asked for your page.
- How do I verify a request really came from ChatGPT-User?
OpenAI publishes the IP ranges it crawls from at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. A user-agent string is trivially spoofed, so anything acting on ChatGPT-User traffic (rate limits, firewall rules, analytics segments) should check the address against that list rather than trusting the header.
Is ChatGPT-User blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it, because a firewall rule can block ChatGPT-User while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free