OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's search crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT search; sites that block it won't appear as cited sources in ChatGPT search answers.

By Brandon MinaCEO, BrandPilot AIUpdated November 2026

Short answer

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler that indexes web pages for ChatGPT's search features. Sites that block it in robots.txt will not appear as cited sources in ChatGPT search answers. It is separate from GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler, allowing publishers to allow search visibility while opting out of model training.