OAI-SearchBot: the Crawler Behind ChatGPT Search
OAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler that surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. If it cannot read your site, your pages cannot be cited in ChatGPT search answers, whatever you do about GPTBot.
OAI-SearchBotWhat OAI-SearchBot does
OpenAI describes OAI-SearchBot as the bot that surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. When ChatGPT searches the web to answer a question, the pages it can show and link come from what this crawler has been allowed to read. OpenAI's guidance for publishers who want to appear in ChatGPT search summaries is simply to make sure they are not blocking OAI-SearchBot.
It is separate from GPTBot, which collects training data, and from ChatGPT-User, which opens a page when a person asks ChatGPT to. OpenAI says each setting "is independent of the others".
OAI-SearchBot user agent
OpenAI documents the full string like this (the version numbers may change):
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/searchbotIn robots.txt, use the token OAI-SearchBot. To verify a request, check its IP against openai.com/searchbot.json.
How to allow OAI-SearchBot
It is allowed by default unless a rule or a firewall blocks it. To be explicit:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Then check for the blocks robots.txt cannot show: firewall rules, bot-protection services and CDN settings that refuse AI crawlers. The AI visibility checker requests your homepage as OAI-SearchBot and tells you if it gets through.
How to block OAI-SearchBot (and what happens)
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Blocking it keeps your pages out of ChatGPT search answers. If what you want is to stay out of search for a single page, OpenAI points publishers to the noindex meta tag instead, and notes that the crawler must be allowed to read the page to see that tag. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to apply.
How to see its visits
In your server or CDN logs, filter the user agent by OAI-SearchBot. Pages it fetches are pages ChatGPT search can use. Visitors who then click through from ChatGPT arrive with utm_source=chatgpt.com in the link, so they show up in your analytics as a separate source.
For the full process of earning those citations, see How to get cited by ChatGPT.
Can AI assistants read your site?
Check your homepage as ten AI crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Free, about 30 seconds, no signup.