GPTBot
AEOeye editorial team · AEO Glossary
OpenAI's crawler that collects web content for training its models. ChatGPT search uses a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot.
GPTBot is the user agent OpenAI uses to collect content that may be used to train its foundation models. OpenAI documents it separately from OAI-SearchBot, which surfaces sites in ChatGPT search answers, and the two robots.txt settings are independent: blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search.
Blocking GPTBot keeps future crawls out of training data; it is a reasonable choice for publishers with licensable content. For most brands we think it is the wrong default, because model memory is part of how ChatGPT describes a category. If you want to stay visible in ChatGPT search, never block OAI-SearchBot.
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