Skip to content
Crawlable

ChatGPT-User

OpenAI · User-action fetcher

Operator
OpenAI
Runs JavaScript
No
Blocking costs visibility
Yes

What it does

ChatGPT-User fetches a page because a user asked about that specific link. Fetches a page when a ChatGPT user follows or asks about a specific link.

It does not execute JavaScript. Whatever your server returns in the initial HTML response is the entire page as far as ChatGPT-User is concerned — if your content is rendered client-side, this crawler reads an empty container.

Should you block ChatGPT-User?

Blocking it means that when someone pastes your URL and asks what it says, the assistant cannot read it and says so. This is the most direct visibility loss of the three.

When a person pastes your URL into ChatGPT and asks what it says, the fetch is refused and the assistant tells them it cannot access the page. This is the most visible failure mode of any crawler on this list, because a real person is watching it happen in real time.

To allow it

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

To block it

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

Put the rule in your robots.txt at the site root. A group that names ChatGPT-User explicitly takes precedence over your User-agent: * group, so naming it is how you make your intent survive later edits to the wildcard rules.

Verifying a real ChatGPT-User request

OpenAI publishes IP ranges for user-initiated fetches separately from both the training and search crawlers. These requests are one-off and driven by a human action, so they arrive in ones and twos rather than as a sustained crawl.

The mistake people make

Treating this as a scraper and rate-limiting it. It is not crawling you; it is a person asking about your page. Rate limits tuned for bulk crawlers routinely catch it on the first request.

OpenAI's other crawlers

Can ChatGPT-User reach your site?

The free scan parses your robots.txt, evaluates every AI crawler against it, and tells you how much of a page ChatGPT-User would actually come away with.

Run the free scan