ChatGPT-User
OpenAI · User fetch · robots.txt: Not always
Visits a web page when a ChatGPT or Custom GPT user's request needs it; it does not crawl the web automatically.
Block ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /A Disallow line may not stop ChatGPT-User, because OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply to user-initiated visits. It also has no bearing on ChatGPT search: OpenAI says to use OAI-SearchBot for search opt-outs.
Allow ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block ChatGPT-User. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Facts
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Purpose
- User-requested fetch
- Obeys robots.txt
- Not always. OpenAI says that because these visits are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent string contains "ChatGPT-User/1.0".
- How to verify it
- Match the request's IP address against OpenAI's published ChatGPT-User IP list.
Published list: openai.com/chatgpt-user.json — 229 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 22 Sep 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them.
What OpenAI says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“When users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question, it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent.”
“ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion.”
“Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.”
“ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search. Please use OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt for managing Search opt outs and automatic crawl.”
“Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0;”
“Published IP addresses:”
Sources
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI Crawlers — fetched and checked 2026-09-22
- OpenAI: ChatGPT-User IP ranges (chatgpt-user.json) — fetched and checked 2026-09-22