GPTBot

GPTBot is one of several OpenAI user agents. OpenAI explicitly distinguishes it from OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT Search) and ChatGPT-User (user-triggered retrieval). This distinction matters because the bots serve different purposes.

GPTBotGPTBot is the crawler documented by OpenAI that typically fetches content for training future models. It can be specifically allowed or blocked via robots.txt.Open glossary entry → is typically associated with model training. If you do not want content used for training, you can block it:

• User-agent: GPTBot
• Disallow: /

It is important not to confuse GPTBot with the search and retrieval bots. Blocking all OpenAI bots indiscriminately may also block the functions relevant for ChatGPT visibility. A common strategy is to block GPTBot while allowing OAI-SearchBotOAI-SearchBot is the crawler documented by OpenAI for ChatGPT Search. It fetches content so that public websites can appear as a source in ChatGPT summaries, snippets and answers.Open glossary entry → and ChatGPT-UserChatGPT-User is the user agent documented by OpenAI for user-triggered retrieval. It fetches a page when a user enters a specific URL or query in ChatGPT.Open glossary entry →.