OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is the web crawler OpenAI uses to find websites and show them in ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI's crawler page recommends that sites wanting to appear in those results allow OAI-SearchBot in their robots.txt file and let through requests from the IP addresses OpenAI publishes for it.
Source: OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, checked October 29, 2026
What OAI-SearchBot means for your business
A robots.txt change doesn't land right away. OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours after you update the file for its search systems to adjust, so if you've just unblocked the crawler, we'd give it a day before checking again.
OpenAI lists the addresses its search crawler uses at openai.com/searchbot.json, and we'd give that list to whoever runs your hosting so they can let those visits through. The AI crawler entry covers the other places a block can hide.
In your server logs, these visits show OAI-SearchBot and a version number inside a longer browser-style name. We'd search the logs for it to see whether it's reaching your pages at all. If ChatGPT search names your competitors and never you, making sure ChatGPT's search crawler can get in comes early in our checks.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview both kept OAI-SearchBot apart from GPTBot and cited OpenAI's crawler page. Google's other sources were small AI-tool sites and agencies, and no OpenAI page ranked in its regular results.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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