ChatGPT-User: what it is and how to block it

Visits pages when a ChatGPT user or a Custom GPT asks for them. It doesn’t crawl automatically.

User-requested fetchOperator: OpenAIOpenAI: Overview of OpenAI Crawlers

Does ChatGPT-User follow robots.txt?

OpenAI says that because these visits are user-initiated, robots.txt rules may not apply.

What blocking it does

A Disallow is a signal only; OpenAI does not promise to follow it for user-initiated fetches. It has no effect on ChatGPT search inclusion.

Because OpenAI describes ChatGPT-User as fetching pages on a user's behalf, treat a robots.txt rule as a request rather than a guarantee. For a hard block, filter the user agent or OpenAI's published IP ranges at your server or CDN.

User-agent string

How it appears in your server logs (from OpenAI's documentation; the version number can change):

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

Anyone can send this string. Verify real visits against the operator's published IP ranges or reverse DNS before trusting it.

Other OpenAI tokens

GPTBot: model training. Crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models.
OAI-SearchBot: ai search index. Surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.

Block ChatGPT-User everywhere

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

Block only some folders

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /members/
Disallow: /drafts/

Explicitly allow it

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

A group that names ChatGPT-User replaces the * group for it. Copy any shared rules into this group too. Test the result.

ChatGPT-User questions

What is ChatGPT-User?

ChatGPT-User is operated by OpenAI. Visits pages when a ChatGPT user or a Custom GPT asks for them. It doesn’t crawl automatically.

How do I block ChatGPT-User?

Add "User-agent: ChatGPT-User" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. OpenAI says that because these visits are user-initiated, robots.txt rules may not apply.

What happens if I block ChatGPT-User?

A Disallow is a signal only; OpenAI does not promise to follow it for user-initiated fetches. It has no effect on ChatGPT search inclusion.

Does blocking ChatGPT-User block other OpenAI crawlers?

No. OpenAI documents GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot separately; each needs its own User-agent line if you want to block it.