GlossaryPublished IP ranges
What is published IP ranges?
Published IP ranges are the lists of IP addresses an operator makes public for its crawlers and agents, so site owners can confirm that a request wearing the operator’s name really came from them.
Also called: crawler IP list, bot IP addresses.
OpenAI publishes separate lists for GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot. Google publishes lists for Googlebot and for its other crawlers, Microsoft for bingbot, Anthropic and Perplexity for their agents. Most are JSON files at a documented URL and change every few weeks as addresses are added.
agenttraffic ships a snapshot of every list it knows about, records when each was published, and checks every matching request against it. Because lists change, a stale snapshot would mark real requests from new addresses as spoofed, so the report says how old its ranges are and the update command fetches fresh ones.
Not every operator publishes ranges. Bytespider, Diffbot and DuckDuckGo’s agents do not, and their requests are reported as unverified rather than guessed at.
Related terms
- Bot verification: Bot verification is checking that a request claiming to be a known bot really came from its operator, by comparing the request’s IP address with the addresses the operator publishes, or by reverse DNS when no list exists..
- Spoofed user agent: A spoofed user agent is a request that claims to be a known bot, such as Googlebot or ChatGPT-User, but comes from an IP address outside the ranges that bot’s operator publishes.
- Reverse DNS verification: Reverse DNS verification confirms a crawler by looking up the hostname for its IP address, checking that the hostname belongs to the operator’s domain, and then resolving that hostname forward to make sure it points back to the same IP..
Published 2026-09-21, updated 2026-09-21.