OAI-SearchBot

What it is

OAI-SearchBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to power search results inside ChatGPT. When ChatGPT looks something up to answer a question, this is the bot that fetched and indexed the pages it can cite.

It is run by OpenAI, and its job is retrieval, not training. That makes it a different animal from GPTBot, which collects data to train models. OAI-SearchBot keeps an index fresh so ChatGPT can pull current, sourced answers and link back to you.

It respects robots.txt. If you block it, ChatGPT cannot surface your pages in its search results. See OpenAI's official bots documentation for the canonical list.

Why it matters

If you want to show up when someone asks ChatGPT a question in your space, OAI-SearchBot has to be allowed to read your site. Block it and you opt out of that surface entirely.

Allowing it does not feed your content into model training. Those are separate, independently controllable bots, so you can be visible in ChatGPT search while still keeping GPTBot out if you prefer.

One catch: like most AI crawlers, OAI-SearchBot reads raw HTML and does not run JavaScript. If your key content only appears after client-side rendering, the bot sees an empty page. Our explainer on how AI crawlers actually fetch your pages covers what to fix.