ChatGPT-User: what it is and how to block it

Operator

OpenAI

Type

User-triggered

robots.txt token

ChatGPT-User

Follows robots.txt

Partly, per OpenAI

IP ranges

Published

Blocked by name

7.0% of top sites

What is ChatGPT-User?

ChatGPT-User is OpenAI's user-triggered crawler: it fetches a page when a user asks an AI assistant to. In OpenAI's words:

“OpenAI also uses ChatGPT-User for certain user actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs. When users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question, it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent.”

“ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion.”

“ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search. Please use OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt for managing Search opt outs and automatic crawl.”

ChatGPT-User user agent string

OpenAI documents this user agent string for ChatGPT-User:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

In robots.txt, use the token ChatGPT-User, not the full string. Crawlers match on the token, and version numbers in the full string can change.

How many websites block ChatGPT-User?

In our Oct 8, 2026 check of 817 of the most-visited websites, 7.0% block ChatGPT-User by name for their whole site (57 sites).

For comparison, 0.1% of the same sites block Googlebot by name. The sites are the top 1,000 origins in the Chrome UX Report for August 2026; see how we measured.

How to block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt

Add this group to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain to block ChatGPT-User from your whole site:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

To block only part of your site, list those paths instead:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /private/

A group that names ChatGPT-User replaces your User-agent: * rules for it entirely (RFC 9309). If your catch-all group blocks paths that ChatGPT-User should also stay out of, repeat them in its group. To let ChatGPT-User in while a catch-all rule blocks others:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

OpenAI says robots.txt doesn't fully control ChatGPT-User. To stop it completely, block it at your firewall or CDN using the verification details below.

“Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.”

What happens if you block ChatGPT-User?

OpenAI doesn't document what blocking ChatGPT-User changes.

How to verify requests from ChatGPT-User

OpenAI publishes the IP addresses ChatGPT-User uses. Check a request's IP address against that list before trusting its user agent, which any client can fake.

Other OpenAI crawlers

• GPTBot · AI training
• OAI-SearchBot · Search
• OAI-AdsBot · Ad review

See every AI crawler and how often top sites block it