OAI-SearchBot: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt

OAI-SearchBot is operated by OpenAI. It is classified here as Search (Search index). Verification method: Published CIDR list.

Exact user-agent string

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. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.

How to verify OAI-SearchBot is genuine

Match the source IP against OpenAI's published CIDR list: https://openai.com/searchbot.json

35 ranges published, as of 2026-01-02. Pulled live at build time, never hardcoded.

How to block or allow OAI-SearchBot

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.

What blocking OAI-SearchBot costs you

This is the expensive one to block. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. If being cited inside ChatGPT matters to you, this is the token to allow even when you disallow GPTBot.

What is specific to OAI-SearchBot

OAI-SearchBot changes do not take effect immediately. OpenAI documents roughly a 24 hour lag from a robots.txt edit to their systems reflecting it, so a site that allows the token today will not appear in ChatGPT search answers today, and a site that blocks it will keep being crawled for about a day. When testing an opt-in, an unchanged log the same afternoon means nothing. OAI-SearchBot also carries the same optional `robots.txt` marker in its user-agent that GPTBot does.

Verify a request claiming to be OAI-SearchBot

Check a OAI-SearchBot request against OpenAI's published ranges

Source

Primary documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots. Last verified 2026-08-02.

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