What is OAI-SearchBot? How to allow or block OpenAI's crawler

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's agent for AI search and live answers. Powers search-style results surfaced in ChatGPT.

OpenAI states OAI-SearchBot respects robots.txt rules.

Add "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt file. The change takes effect the next time the bot fetches your robots.txt.

No. OAI-SearchBot is separate from Googlebot, which handles Google Search indexing. Blocking OAI-SearchBot has no effect on your traditional search rankings, but it does remove your pages from the AI answers OpenAI's assistant serves to its users.

Search your server access logs for the string "OAI-SearchBot" — for example: grep -i "OAI-SearchBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | wc -l. Our free AI Bot Log Analyzer does this in your browser: paste a log file and it counts hits per AI crawler, including OAI-SearchBot, with per-path breakdowns.

You don't — OAI-SearchBot isn't a tool you run. It's OpenAI's own crawler, operated by OpenAI, that visits your site from their infrastructure. The only control you have over it is whether you allow or block it, via robots.txt or a server rule. If you're looking to crawl other sites yourself, you'd write your own crawler or use a crawling library; sending "OAI-SearchBot" as your user agent would be impersonating OpenAI.

Almost certainly not. Crawl-delay was never part of the original robots.txt specification — Google has publicly said it ignores the directive, and the AI crawlers that model their parsers on Google's do the same. OpenAI publishes no position on crawl-delay for OAI-SearchBot, so treat it as unsupported. If OAI-SearchBot is hitting your site harder than you want, rate-limit it at the server or CDN instead: a Cloudflare rate-limiting rule or an nginx limit_req zone matched on the user agent will actually be enforced, whereas a crawl-delay line is only a request that this agent likely never reads.

OpenAI states OAI-SearchBot honors robots.txt, so if you are still seeing hits the cause is usually one of four things rather than the bot misbehaving. First, robots.txt is cached — OpenAI may be working from a copy fetched up to 24 hours before your change. Second, the rule may not match: robots.txt user-agent matching is on a prefix of the token, and a typo or a trailing character breaks it silently. Third, the block may sit under a different user-agent group than the one this bot reads, since a bot obeys only the most specific group that matches it, not the wildcard group as well. Fourth, the traffic may be something else sending OAI-SearchBot as its user agent, which anything can do.

Treat it as no unless OpenAI says otherwise. Rendering JavaScript costs an order of magnitude more than fetching HTML, and most AI crawlers — unlike Googlebot, which runs a full headless Chrome — read the raw HTML response and stop there. The practical consequence: anything your page loads client-side after the initial response is likely invisible to OAI-SearchBot. If your main content is client-rendered, server-render it or pre-render it so the text exists in the first response.

OpenAI publishes them as JSON at https://openai.com/searchbot.json, updated as their infrastructure changes. Fetch that file rather than hard-coding the prefixes, and match the request IP against it to confirm a visit is genuinely OAI-SearchBot. This is the only reliable check — the user-agent header is self-declared, so a scraper can send "OAI-SearchBot" while coming from anywhere.

There is no fixed schedule. OAI-SearchBot serves live answers, so its crawl rate tracks demand — pages that come up in OpenAI conversations get fetched more often, and a site nobody asks about may see it rarely or never. Frequency also rises with how often your pages change and how many links point at them. The only way to know for your own site is to measure it: grep your access log for the user agent, or paste the log into our AI Bot Log Analyzer, which breaks hits down by date and path in your browser.

OpenAI publishes it at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots. That page is the authoritative source for the user-agent string and OpenAI's stated crawling policy, and OpenAI also publishes OAI-SearchBot's IP ranges as JSON at https://openai.com/searchbot.json so you can verify requests rather than trusting the header.