ChatGPT-User: OpenAI's fetch for a person
ChatGPT-User belongs to OpenAI. It opens a page at the moment a person asks an assistant about it. It doesn't crawl on its own. When it is turned away, the assistant can't read your page while answering, so it answers from memory or from other sites.
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Used for | ChatGPT |
| Type | Fetch for a person |
| robots.txt name | ChatGPT-User |
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot |
| Published IP ranges | https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json |
| Blocked by top sites | 9.7% of 740 (study) |
| Official documentation | developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots |
It is not used to decide whether a site appears in ChatGPT search; OAI-SearchBot does that.
Allow or block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt
To block it on the whole site:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (useful when a rule for all bots would block it):
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /OpenAI notes that because these requests are started by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply to them. To stop them reliably, block them at your server or CDN.
robots.txt is a request, not a wall. A CDN or firewall rule can turn a bot away even when robots.txt allows it, and nothing in the file will show that.
The free check requests your home page as a browser and as AI bots, reads your robots.txt and shows what gets blocked. No sign-up.
Check my siteIs it really ChatGPT-User?
Anyone can send a request with this bot's name. OpenAI publishes the IP ranges its requests come from, so a request that carries the name from another address is an impostor. PageLens checks every request from this bot against that list.
See ChatGPT-User on your own site
ChatGPT-User doesn't run JavaScript, so analytics scripts never record it. AI Visibility in PageLens reads it from your server or CDN and shows which pages it requested, when, and which requests ended in a 404.