Glossary · G
GPTBot
GPTBot is the web crawler OpenAI uses to collect content that may be used to improve its models; a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, fetches pages for ChatGPT’s search results.
Extended definition
In more detail.
Both identify themselves by user agent and respect robots.txt. Blocking GPTBot prevents content from being used for training; blocking OAI-SearchBot prevents pages from appearing as sources in ChatGPT search answers. Hosting and security layers sometimes block both by default. An organization that wants to be cited in ChatGPT must allow the search crawler, and should decide about the training crawler deliberately rather than by default.
In our work
Where it appears.
Our crawl and render readiness audit fetches pages as each named crawler and reviews the logs to confirm they arrive.
By David Selakovic · Published 2026-10-16 · Revised 2026-10-16 · Reviewed every 180 days