Learn · AI crawlers
What is OAI-SearchBot?
By Cloute · Published October 1, 2026
The short answer
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to surface websites in ChatGPT's search results. OpenAI says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, so a business that wants to be recommended by ChatGPT should allow it.
OAI-SearchBot visits in Cloute's server logs of local business pages in 2026
of AI answers named a business when the engine had read its own page
when it had not
What does OAI-SearchBot do?
OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." It reads pages ahead of time so ChatGPT can find and link them when someone asks a question that needs current information from the web. It is not OpenAI's training crawler; that is GPTBot.
What happens if I block OAI-SearchBot?
OpenAI says: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." For a local business, that means ChatGPT loses its main route to the business's own pages when it answers a customer.
That route matters. Across 64,441 AI answers about local businesses, the business was named 83.7% of the time when the engine had read one of its own pages, and 16.2% when it had not.
What is OAI-SearchBot's user agent?
- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot
- robots.txt token: OAI-SearchBot
- IP ranges: published by OpenAI at openai.com/searchbot.json.
How long do robots.txt changes take for OAI-SearchBot?
OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours from a robots.txt update for its systems to adjust.
How do I allow OAI-SearchBot but block training?
- User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
- Allow: /
- User-agent: GPTBot
- Disallow: /
This keeps the site in ChatGPT search while telling OpenAI not to use it for training.
Like the other AI crawlers, it does not run JavaScript. A page whose text only appears after scripts load looks empty to it, so the content should be in the HTML the server sends. Cloute found its own website was invisible to AI crawlers for exactly this reason in 2026, and fixed it.
Read next
Research: 80,000+ AI crawler visits to local business websites What is GPTBot? What is ChatGPT-User? AI crawlers: the complete list for 2026 Should a local business block AI crawlers?Questions people ask
Is OAI-SearchBot used to train ChatGPT?
OpenAI describes it as the crawler for ChatGPT's search features. Training is GPTBot's job, and blocking GPTBot is how a site opts out of training.
Should a local business block OAI-SearchBot?
Generally no. OpenAI says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, which is where customers ask ChatGPT who to call or where to go.
How often does OAI-SearchBot visit local business sites?
It made 8,861 visits in Cloute's server logs of local business pages in 2026.
Does OAI-SearchBot follow robots.txt?
Yes. OpenAI says sites can opt out of it in robots.txt, and that changes can take about 24 hours to take effect.
About Cloute. Cloute is an AI visibility company for local businesses. It measures how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews recommend a business against its local competitors, and works every month to move it to the top.