OAI-SearchBot

Often unwantedai

Operated by OpenAI

What is OAI-SearchBot?

OAI-SearchBot is a web crawler operated by OpenAI designed to index websites for real-time search functionality in ChatGPT and SearchGPT. Unlike other OpenAI bots, it does not collect data for AI model training but focuses on retrieving live content for citation in search results.

Why it visits websites

It visits websites to fetch and index content for OpenAI’s search features, enabling the surfacing of relevant web pages in response to user queries. Its activity is tied to providing up-to-date search results rather than training AI models.

Is OAI-SearchBot good or bad for your site?

The bot can increase server load and bandwidth usage due to frequent crawling, potentially affecting site performance for smaller or resource-constrained websites. While it does not harvest data for training, its indexing may still expose content to OpenAI’s ecosystem without direct benefit to the site owner. Blocking it may reduce unnecessary traffic but could limit visibility in OpenAI’s search results.

How to block OAI-SearchBot

To block OAI-SearchBot, add the following directives to your robots.txt file: User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: / Alternatively, block it by user-agent in your server configuration (e.g., .htaccess or nginx) using the string: OAI-SearchBot Example for robots.txt: User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /

Example 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

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