OAI-AdsBot: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt
OAI-AdsBot is operated by OpenAI. It is classified here as Retrieval (Ad landing page validation). Verification method: Published CIDR list.
Exact user-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot
robots.txt token: OAI-AdsBot. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be
forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.
How to verify OAI-AdsBot is genuine
Match the source IP against OpenAI's published CIDR list: https://openai.com/adsbot.json
2 ranges published, as of 2026-05-12. Pulled live at build time, never hardcoded.
How to block or allow OAI-AdsBot
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.
What blocking OAI-AdsBot costs you
Almost nothing, unless you advertise on ChatGPT. OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads, so blocking it affects your own ad landing pages and nothing else. If you do run ChatGPT ads, blocking it means OpenAI cannot validate your landing page against its policies.
What is specific to OAI-AdsBot
OAI-AdsBot only fetches pages that someone has submitted as an ad, which makes it the one OpenAI agent whose appearance in your logs tells you something specific: either you submitted that URL as an ad, or someone else did. Its published range is the smallest of any operator tracked here, currently two prefixes, which reflects how narrow the job is. OpenAI states the data it collects is not used to train foundation models, so it sits outside the GPTBot training question entirely despite being an automated crawler.
Verify a request claiming to be OAI-AdsBot
Check a OAI-AdsBot request against OpenAI's published ranges
Source
Primary documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots. Last verified 2026-08-02.
Other OpenAI crawlers
- GPTBot - AI training crawler
- OAI-SearchBot - Search index
- ChatGPT-User - User-triggered fetch