By Iliass El Barhoumi · Published · Last updated
What is ChatGPT-User?
ChatGPT-User is the user agent ChatGPT sends when a person’s question leads it to visit a web page, and for actions inside Custom GPTs. OpenAI states that it is not used to crawl the web automatically and is not used to decide whether content appears in Search; that is OAI-SearchBot’s job.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Purpose | live answer fetch · ChatGPT conversations |
| robots.txt token | ChatGPT-User |
| In the user-agent | compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot |
| CrawlRadar weight | 1 of the crawler-access weights, never flagged critical |
| Vendor docs | OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers |
How to allow ChatGPT-User in robots.txt
Give ChatGPT-User its own group with Allow: /. A named group overrides the User-agent: * group, so this works even when the wildcard disallows everything:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /How to block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt
Replace Allow with Disallow. To block only part of the site, disallow that path instead of /:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /- Tokens are matched case-insensitively, but writing
ChatGPT-Userexactly as the vendor spells it avoids surprises with stricter parsers. - Check your CDN and security plugins too: a firewall rule can block ChatGPT-User without any line in robots.txt.
Should you block ChatGPT-User?
Leave ChatGPT-User allowed. Each request is a person in a conversation that needed your page, the highest-intent fetch an AI system makes. OpenAI’s documentation also notes that because these fetches are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply to them, so a Disallow line is not a reliable way to stop them anyway.
How to verify a request is really ChatGPT-User
OpenAI publishes the IP addresses ChatGPT-User uses at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. A request that claims to be ChatGPT-User from any other address is someone borrowing the name, and should be treated like any other scraper. CrawlRadar’s collector checks every hit against that list and labels it verified or spoofed.
OpenAI’s other AI crawlers
Each OpenAI token is a separate robots.txt decision. Blocking one has no effect on the others.
| Token | Purpose | What blocking it costs |
|---|---|---|
GPTBot | training | Blocking it keeps your pages out of future OpenAI model training. It does not remove you from ChatGPT Search, which crawls under OAI-SearchBot. |
OAI-SearchBot | search index | This is the crawler that decides whether ChatGPT Search can cite you. Blocking it removes you from that citation pool entirely. |
Is ChatGPT-User visiting your site?
Your analytics will not tell you. AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a tag-based tool such as Google Analytics never records them. CrawlRadar’s collector reads your own request path and records each ChatGPT-User visit, the page it fetched, and whether it came from OpenAI. See the full AI crawler directory for the other tokens CrawlRadar checks.
Frequently asked questions
Is ChatGPT-User a crawler?
Not in the usual sense. It fetches one page because a conversation needs it, rather than walking your site on a schedule, so its volume follows how often people ask ChatGPT about you or paste your links.
Does a ChatGPT-User visit mean ChatGPT cited me?
It means ChatGPT read the page during a conversation, which usually comes before a citation. When a citation sends someone to your site, that visit arrives separately as a referral from chatgpt.com, which CrawlRadar’s tracking tag records as AI traffic.