- Category
- AI search
- Level
- Intermediate
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Purpose
- ChatGPT search results and citations
- robots.txt token
- OAI-SearchBot
- Check it free
- Robots.txt Checker
What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT's search feature. It discovers and reads pages so that ChatGPT can surface and link to them when it answers with search. It's separate from GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler.
Why it matters
If OAI-SearchBot can't reach your pages, ChatGPT can't cite them in search answers. OpenAI's documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they may still appear as plain navigational links.
How to allow it
If your robots.txt has no rule that blocks it, it's allowed. To be explicit:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Also check that your firewall or CDN doesn't block its requests.