OpenAIAI searchIP ranges published
What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that builds the search index behind ChatGPT search. It visits pages ahead of any question so ChatGPT can cite them later. It is a search crawler, not a training crawler (GPTBot) and not a live fetcher (ChatGPT-User). Allowing it is what makes your pages eligible to appear as sources in ChatGPT answers.
User agent strings
OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbotagenttraffic matches on the token OAI-SearchBot.
What kind of agent it is
An AI search crawler builds the index an assistant cites from; it visits ahead of any question and its hits do not map to readers.
Verification
OpenAI publishes IP ranges for this agent (35 prefixes, list dated 2026-01-02, specific to OAI-SearchBot). agenttraffic checks every OAI-SearchBot request against them and reports verified, spoofed, or unchecked when no client IP is available.
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json: 35 prefixes, published 2026-01-02, scope agent. Snapshot in the shipped registry: 2026-08-28.
Impersonation of OAI-SearchBot is rare but rising, since some scrapers assume search crawlers are allowed where training crawlers are blocked. Verification against OpenAI's published searchbot ranges separates them.
robots.txt
The robots.txt token is OAI-SearchBot. Copy one of these blocks:
# Allow
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
# Block
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /What it means in your logs
OAI-SearchBot visits look like a classic search engine crawl: a spread of URLs, a fondness for pages linked from your homepage and sitemap, and periodic re-fetches of pages that changed. None of those hits are readers. What they represent is eligibility. A page that OAI-SearchBot has never fetched cannot be cited by ChatGPT search, so the page list under this agent is effectively your ChatGPT index coverage.
agenttraffic classifies it as search and includes it, together with live fetches, in the "pages assistants fetched" section, because both feed what people ultimately see inside an assistant.
Verification details
OpenAI publishes a dedicated IP range list for OAI-SearchBot. agenttraffic ships a snapshot with its publish date and checks each request against it, reporting verified, spoofed, or unchecked. Since the same operator publishes three separate lists, a request that matches the GPTBot list while carrying the OAI-SearchBot UA is still marked spoofed: verification is per agent, not per operator, when the operator publishes per-agent data.
Blocking OAI-SearchBot
Blocking this token removes your site from ChatGPT search results and from the citations ChatGPT shows next to answers. That is the opposite of what most sites want, and it does not stop training, which is GPTBot's job. The usual configuration is to allow OAI-SearchBot and decide about GPTBot separately. OpenAI documents that OAI-SearchBot honours its token and that its index respects a GPTBot disallow only for GPTBot, not for search.
Related
The three OpenAI agents form the most searched comparison on this site; see the GPTBot vs ChatGPT-User vs OAI-SearchBot page for a side-by-side table of what each one does and which robots.txt rule affects which product.
Coverage over time
Because OAI-SearchBot re-fetches changed pages, a stable site shows a slow steady trickle and a site with new content shows a burst shortly after publication, followed by re-fetches over the next days. Comparing the page list from one week to the next tells you whether new pages are entering the index promptly. A page that has been live for a fortnight and never appears under this agent is one ChatGPT cannot cite; the fix is the same as for any search engine: link it from a page that is already crawled and list it in your sitemap.
See it in your logs
npx agenttraffic ./logs --days 7Point it at CloudFront, nginx or Apache logs. OAI-SearchBot appears under its own row with verified, spoofed and unchecked counts kept separate.
Related agents
- ChatGPT-User (OpenAI, live fetch)
- GPTBot (OpenAI, training)
FAQ
What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that builds the search index behind ChatGPT search. It visits pages ahead of any question so ChatGPT can cite them later. It is a search crawler, not a training crawler (GPTBot) and not a live fetcher (ChatGPT-User). Allowing it is what makes your pages eligible to appear as sources in ChatGPT answers.
How do I verify OAI-SearchBot traffic is real?
OpenAI publishes IP ranges for this agent (35 prefixes, list dated 2026-01-02, specific to OAI-SearchBot). agenttraffic checks every OAI-SearchBot request against them and reports verified, spoofed, or unchecked when no client IP is available.
How do I block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt?
Add "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /". OpenAI documents this token; whether it is honoured is up to the operator, and blocking is only enforced by their crawler, not by your server.
Do OAI-SearchBot hits mean people found my page in ChatGPT?
No. They mean OpenAI indexed the page. A person finding it shows up later as a ChatGPT-User fetch, or as a browser visit with a chatgpt.com referrer if they clicked the citation.
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Published 2026-08-28, updated 2026-08-28. Facts come from the agenttraffic registry.