Every AI bot · OpenAI

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's crawler that builds an index for AI search answers.

In robots.txt: User-agent: OAI-SearchBot

Named by3.8%of readable robots.txt files on the top 1M (23,100 of 600,979)

Of those, block it25.7%shut it out of the whole site (5,937 of 23,100)

Same sites, since CC-MAIN-2026-34+0.0 ptsshare of the same 394,690 sites that block it by name: 1.0% → 1.0%

Via Cloudflare's file2.5%of its blocks come from Cloudflare's ready-made robots.txt (148 of 5,937)

25.7%

36.4%

37.9%

Block the whole site: 5,937Block some paths: 8,412Name it but allow it: 8,751

Every robots.txt file on the top 1M that names OAI-SearchBot, by what the rules that apply to it say.

OpenAI's other bots

Sites often treat one company's bots differently, depending on what each is for.

Bot	Purpose	Files naming it	Of those, block it
GPTBot	Collects pages to train AI	78,270	71.9%
ChatGPT-User	Fetches a page for a chatbot user	34,242	48.3%

Who does what

The highest-ranked sites on the top million in each group. Click one to see its whole robots.txt verdict.

Block it

Block some paths

Name it and allow it

Lists skip sites we don't showcase (adult content).

What this means for you: blocking OAI-SearchBot can keep your pages out of OpenAI's AI search answers, including any links back to you. Decide each bot on what it's for, not who runs it.