OAI-AdsBot: what it is and how to block it

Operator

OpenAI

Type

Ad review

robots.txt token

OAI-AdsBot

Follows robots.txt

OpenAI doesn't say

IP ranges

Published

Blocked by name

0.0% of top sites

What is OAI-AdsBot?

OAI-AdsBot is OpenAI's ad review crawler: it checks the landing pages of ads. In OpenAI's words:

“OAI-AdsBot is used to validate the safety of web pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT. When you submit an ad, OpenAI may visit the landing page to ensure it complies with our policies.”

“OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads, and the data collected by OAI-AdsBot is not used to train generative AI foundation models.”

“We may also use content from the landing page to determine when it's most relevant to show the ad to users.”

OAI-AdsBot user agent string

OpenAI documents this user agent string for OAI-AdsBot:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot

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

How many websites block OAI-AdsBot?

In our Oct 8, 2026 check of 817 of the most-visited websites, 0.0% block OAI-AdsBot by name for their whole site (0 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 OAI-AdsBot in robots.txt

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

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /

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

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /private/

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

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /

OpenAI doesn't say whether OAI-AdsBot follows robots.txt, so a robots.txt block is a request it may not honor.

What happens if you block OAI-AdsBot?

OpenAI doesn't document what blocking OAI-AdsBot changes.

How to verify requests from OAI-AdsBot

OpenAI publishes the IP addresses OAI-AdsBot 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
• ChatGPT-User · User-triggered

See every AI crawler and how often top sites block it