GPTBot
OpenAI · Training crawler
What it does
GPTBot collects page content to be used in model training. Collects content for OpenAI model training. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT answers.
It does not execute JavaScript. Whatever your server returns in the initial HTML response is the entire page as far as GPTBot is concerned — if your content is rendered client-side, this crawler reads an empty container.
Should you block GPTBot?
Blocking it keeps your content out of the training corpus. It does not remove you from any answer surface, because this crawler is not what answers are built from.
Your content stops being collected for future OpenAI model training. Nothing changes about how you appear in ChatGPT today, because ChatGPT answers about current events are retrieved live, not recalled from training. This is the crawler people block when they mean "do not train on my work", and blocking it for that reason is coherent.
To allow it
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /To block it
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /Put the rule in your robots.txt at the site root. A group that names GPTBot 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 GPTBot request
OpenAI publishes the IP ranges its crawlers operate from as JSON files on its own domain. Check a request's source IP against that list before trusting the user agent string — the string itself is trivially spoofable and commonly is, by scrapers hoping your firewall has an allow rule for it.
The mistake people make
Blocking GPTBot and assuming that removes you from ChatGPT. It does not. If that was your goal you blocked the wrong bot, and if it was not your goal you may have given up training-data inclusion for nothing.
OpenAI's other crawlers
- OAI-SearchBotBuilds the index behind ChatGPT search results. Blocking it removes you from ChatGPT search.
- ChatGPT-UserFetches a page when a ChatGPT user follows or asks about a specific link.
Can GPTBot reach your site?
The free scan parses your robots.txt, evaluates every AI crawler against it, and tells you how much of a page GPTBot would actually come away with.
Run the free scan