Overview
OAI-SearchBot is a crawler associated with OpenAI, used for surfacing websites in ChatGPT search results and maintaining search freshness.
Its primary user-agent pattern is OAI-SearchBot; related patterns include OpenAI search bot; a representative HTTP user-agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot.
OAI-SearchBot is verified with High confidence. The identity type is Official Documented.
OAI-SearchBot is documented as honoring robots.txt directives.
Treat the user-agent or identity as a claim and corroborate it with published network data, reverse DNS, signed-request evidence, or current operator documentation when available.
Identity
- User-Agent
OAI-SearchBot- Aliases
- OpenAI search bot
- HTTP Agent Examples
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot- Robots.txt Token
OAI-SearchBot- Identity Type
- Official Documented
- Evidence Method
- Verify OAI-SearchBot by matching `OAI-SearchBot` to OpenAI evidence, then corroborating the request with source-network ownership, reverse DNS, signed request data, or current operator documentation.
Classification
- Type
- AI
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- OpenAI
- Purpose
- ai-search
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- surfacing websites in ChatGPT search results and maintaining search freshness
- Detection Notes
- OAI-SearchBot traffic is primarily detected by `OAI-SearchBot`; related patterns include `OpenAI search bot`; a representative HTTP user-agent is `Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot`. Treat these values as identification claims and corroborate them with source-network ownership, reverse DNS, signed request data, or current operator documentation.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
- Spoofing Risk
- OAI-SearchBot can be spoofed if identification relies only on a user-agent string; corroborate the request with stronger operator-controlled evidence when available.
- Risk
- Safe
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /