CrawlPactOAI-SearchBot
- User-agent token
- OAI-SearchBot
- Purpose
- Search
- Status
- active
- Last verified
- 2026-07-24
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI’s documented crawler for surfacing and linking to web content inside
ChatGPT’s search features, distinct from the training-focused GPTBot.
Site-owner controls
Disallowing OAI-SearchBot removes this content from ChatGPT’s search-style results. It does
not affect GPTBot (OpenAI’s training crawler) or ChatGPT-User (fetches made in direct
response to a user’s request inside ChatGPT) — both evaluated as separate tokens. See
/limitations for what a robots.txt rule can and cannot guarantee.
Why the distinction matters
A website that wants to remain discoverable through AI-assisted search while still restricting
training use of its content needs to treat OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot as separate decisions.
CrawlPact’s “Allow Search, Block Training” preset is built around exactly this kind of
distinction.
Example robots.txt configuration
To disallow OAI-SearchBot specifically, without affecting any other crawler:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /If no dedicated User-agent: OAI-SearchBot group exists in a domain's robots.txt, this crawler falls back to whatever the wildcard User-agent: * group says (RFC 9309) — see robots.txt syntax basics for how group selection works.
Verified against the source above as of 2026-07-24 — see how CrawlPact verifies crawler information.
See how this applies to your own site
Run a free audit to check your declared AI crawler policy against your own domain, or use the AI crawler checker to check this one crawler specifically.
Audit a domain