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 — a firewall rule can block ChatGPT-User while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free