ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is the name OpenAI's software uses when it opens a web page for someone using ChatGPT or a Custom GPT. OpenAI's crawler page says it doesn't crawl the web on its own and isn't used to decide what appears in ChatGPT search. Because a person starts each visit, OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to it.
Source: OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, checked October 29, 2026
What ChatGPT-User means for your business
A ChatGPT-User visit in your server logs means someone asked ChatGPT something and it opened your page to answer. Its job differs from GPTBot, which collects pages for training, and from OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI uses for ChatGPT's search results.
Blocking it takes a firewall or server rule, because OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply. We'd think hard before adding one. Each visit starts with a person asking ChatGPT a question your page might answer, and some of those people may be buyers.
OpenAI publishes the IP addresses ChatGPT-User uses at openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. A user agent name is easy to copy, so we'd match a visit's address against that list before trusting it.
If your security settings might be turning away visits people start from ChatGPT, checking whether your firewall lets ChatGPT's visits through is one of the first checks we'd run.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview described ChatGPT-User the way OpenAI's crawler page does and cited that page plus an AI tracking company's glossary. ChatGPT called it a user agent linked to its web fetching, cited nothing, and asked where we'd seen it.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in crawlers and technical access
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