What is GPTBot?

How it identifies itself

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/gptbot
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.1; +https://openai.com/gptbot
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot

agenttraffic recognises it by the name GPTBot.

What it does

A training crawler collects pages to train models. Blocking it costs you no citations and no readers. More on training crawler agents.

Is it really them?

OpenAI publishes the IP addresses this agent uses (21 address ranges, list dated 2025-10-30, specific to GPTBot). agenttraffic checks every GPTBot request against them and reports it as verified, spoofed, or unchecked when the log has no client IP.

• https://openai.com/gptbot.json: 21 address ranges, published 2025-10-30, specific to this agent. Copy shipped with agenttraffic: 2026-08-28.

GPTBot is impersonated less often than ChatGPT-User because there is nothing to gain from looking like a training crawler, but SEO tools and log analysers still emit it during tests. The spoofed column catches those.

How to block it

In robots.txt it goes by GPTBot. Copy one of these:

# Allow
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

# Block
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

What it means in your logs

GPTBot traffic is the one category on the report that carries no reader behind it. A person did not ask for your page; a scheduler did. agenttraffic therefore hides training crawlers from the default terminal report and shows them with --show-training, so the AI crawler section stays focused on fetches that map to people.

That does not make GPTBot uninteresting. Its page list tells you which of your content OpenAI considers worth collecting, and a sudden increase usually precedes a model training cycle. Sites that publish a lot of long-form text sometimes see GPTBot as their single largest bot by request count.

Where the verification data comes from

OpenAI publishes a list of IP addresses for GPTBot, separate from the ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot lists. agenttraffic ships a dated snapshot and checks every GPTBot request against it. Because the list is small and specific, verification is reliable: a GPTBot name from an IP outside the list is almost always a tool pretending, and it lands in the spoofed column rather than being counted as OpenAI.

Blocking GPTBot

This is the one OpenAI agent where blocking costs nothing visible. Disallowing GPTBot in robots.txt removes your pages from future training crawls and leaves search citations and live fetches untouched, because those use different agents. OpenAI states that GPTBot honours the robots.txt name. If you want to opt out of training but stay reachable in ChatGPT answers, block GPTBot and allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User.

Versions

The version number in the user agent string has moved from 1.0 through 1.2. agenttraffic matches on the GPTBot name, so every version is recognised without a registry change; the exact strings above are listed so you can grep for them directly.

Reading the page list

The pages GPTBot fetches are a rough proxy for what OpenAI's collection pipeline treats as text worth having. Long articles, documentation and reference pages dominate; app shells, login pages and paginated archives appear rarely. If a page you consider important never shows up, the usual causes are a robots.txt rule broader than intended, a noindex header (which GPTBot does not use, but which often travels with a disallow), or the page simply not being linked from anywhere GPTBot has already been. Fix the linking first; GPTBot discovers pages the same way search crawlers do.

Related agents

• ChatGPT-User (OpenAI, live fetch)
• OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI, ai search)

Published 2026-08-28, updated 2026-08-28. Facts come from the agenttraffic registry.