What is GPTBot?

RushilFounder, Ru Visibility2 October 2026

Short answer

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting content used to improve its AI models. Blocking it tells OpenAI not to use your content for training. It does not decide whether you appear in ChatGPT search; that is a different crawler, OAI-SearchBot.

What GPTBot does

In OpenAI's words, “GPTBot is used to make our generative AI foundation models more useful and safe”, and “disallowing GPTBot indicates a site's content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models” ( OpenAI).

GPTBot is one of three OpenAI agents

AI crawlers, who runs them, and what they are for
Name in robots.txt	Company	What it is for	Kind
OAI-SearchBot	OpenAI	Finds pages to show in ChatGPT search	Answers
ChatGPT-User	OpenAI	Opens a page when a ChatGPT user's request needs it	Answers
GPTBot	OpenAI	Collects content for training OpenAI's models	Training

The one that matters for being found is OAI-SearchBot: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.” ChatGPT-User is different again: it fetches a page because a person asked, and OpenAI notes that “robots.txt rules may not apply” to it.

How to block or allow it

Add this to your robots.txt to block it:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

OpenAI says “each setting is independent of the others”, so blocking GPTBot leaves OAI-SearchBot untouched, and that “it can take ~24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for our systems to adjust.”

Should you block it?

That is your call. It won't change whether ChatGPT search can show you today. The bigger risk is blocking OAI-SearchBot by accident in the same sweep; here is how to tell them apart.

Sources

OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers

Find out what AI says about you.

Send us your web address. We run our own tool on it, free, and send you what it says. The whole thing — not a taster with the useful bits taken out.

Whether AI can even read your site

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Bing all send a small program to read your pages. We knock on your door as each one and see who gets let in. If they are being turned away, nothing else matters until that is fixed.

Two scores out of 100 — one for Google, one for AI

Plus what is behind each number. Where we could only make a fair guess, we say so instead of dressing it up as a measurement.

A list of fixes, best one first

Ordered by what gives you the most for the least work, so the top of the list is the quickest win. It is yours either way — use it with us or without us.

We ran it on our own site too. It told us what we were getting wrong, and we published that. A tool you will not point at yourself is not worth much.

One thing the free check does not do: actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for businesses like yours, dozens of times, and count how often your name comes up. That costs us real money each time we run it, so it comes with paid work.