OpenAI

OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's crawler for indexing content to be used in ChatGPT's search and citation features.

Purpose: ChatGPT search indexing and citations

Quick Facts

Company
OpenAI
Respects robots.txt
Yes
Last Updated
2025-05
Official Documentation

📊 Popularity & Traffic

Allows sites to appear as cited sources in ChatGPT responses.

🤖 User Agent Strings

Use these patterns to identify OAI-SearchBot in your server logs or configure your robots.txt file.

OAI-SearchBot

Respects robots.txt

Indexes content for ChatGPT search answers

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/searchbot

🌐 IP Ranges

Source: Official JSON file
Official source file

Identified IP Ranges6 Ranges

13.65.138.112/28
Subnet with 16 addresses
157.55.132.80/28
Subnet with 16 addresses
157.56.88.96/28
Subnet with 16 addresses
40.84.186.208/28
Subnet with 16 addresses
52.167.144.176/28
Subnet with 16 addresses
20.106.183.128/28
Subnet with 16 addresses

How to read CIDR notation:

The /28 suffix indicates a block of 16 IP addresses. For example,.112/28 covers all addresses from .112 up to .127. Adding these to your firewall will block the entire range used by OAI-SearchBot.

📝 Robots.txt Configuration

Add the following to your robots.txt file to block OAI-SearchBot:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

💡 Important Notes

  • Separate from GPTBot - allows granular control over training vs. search visibility
  • If both GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are allowed, OpenAI may use one crawl for both purposes
Beyond blocking crawlers

See what AI is saying about your brand

Understanding crawlers is step one. With Aiso, you can see the actual conversations happening about your brand inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.