OAI-SearchBot: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What OAI-SearchBot is
OAI-SearchBot builds the retrieval index that OpenAI answers from. This is the category that decides whether you can be cited right now: when someone asks a question and the assistant goes looking for sources, it searches an index this crawler built. Blocking it removes you from those answers.
Operator: OpenAI
robots.txt token: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent on the wire: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot
Category: Live retrieval / search index
What blocking it actually costs
You are removed from the index ChatGPT search draws on. This is the one that costs you citations today.
How to block OAI-SearchBot
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
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 OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
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 OAI-SearchBot 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 OAI-SearchBot 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 OAI-SearchBot at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots.
Common questions
- What user-agent does OAI-SearchBot send?
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot- How do I block OAI-SearchBot?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /The group must name
OAI-SearchBoton 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 OAI-SearchBot cost me?
You are removed from the index ChatGPT search draws on. This is the one that costs you citations today.
- How do I verify a request really came from OAI-SearchBot?
OpenAI publishes the IP ranges it crawls from at https://openai.com/searchbot.json. A user-agent string is trivially spoofed, so anything acting on OAI-SearchBot traffic (rate limits, firewall rules, analytics segments) should check the address against that list rather than trusting the header.
Is OAI-SearchBot blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it, because a firewall rule can block OAI-SearchBot while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free