ChatGPT-User: what it is and how to allow or block it
Visits a page when a ChatGPT user’s request needs it. Not an automatic crawler.
Last checked 2026-10-08
- Company
- OpenAI
- Used for
- ChatGPT and custom GPTs
- Job
- Fetches a page when a user asks
- Follows robots.txt
- May not, for user requests
- Name in robots.txt
- ChatGPT-User
What ChatGPT-User does
ChatGPT-User shows up when someone using ChatGPT or a custom GPT asks for something that requires opening your page. OpenAI says plainly that it “is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion.”
OpenAI also says it “is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search.” To manage ChatGPT search, use OAI-SearchBot instead.
Should you allow it?
Allow it. These visits happen because a real person wanted your page, which is the kind of AI traffic most businesses are after.
What blocking it changes: A robots.txt rule may not stop it, because a person asked for the page. If you need to stop it for certain, that takes a firewall rule against its published addresses.
Allow or block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt
OpenAI’s documentation says: “Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.”
To allow it
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Allow: /
To block it
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /
robots.txt lets every bot in by default, so you only need the allow lines if another rule in your file would otherwise block it. Our robots.txt guide explains how rules for different bots combine.
How it appears in your server logs
OpenAI publishes this as the bot’s user-agent string, the label it sends with every visit:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
How to check a visit is really ChatGPT-User
OpenAI publishes the IP addresses ChatGPT-User fetches from.
Our guide to server log checks shows where to find these visits on common hosting setups.
Source: OpenAI crawler documentation, checked 2026-10-08. Bots and their rules change often, so check the company’s own page before making a decision that matters.
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