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OAI-AdsBot

OpenAI · Unconfirmed · robots.txt: Unconfirmed

Visits the landing page of an ad submitted to run on ChatGPT, to check that it complies with OpenAI's policies; it visits only pages submitted as ads.

Block OAI-AdsBot

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /

Unconfirmed by the operator OpenAI's documentation we checked does not say what blocking OAI-AdsBot changes beyond the crawler itself.

Allow OAI-AdsBot

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /

An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block OAI-AdsBot. 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.

Already have a robots.txt? Paste it into the robots.txt checker to see whether it blocks OAI-AdsBot on a given path, and which line decides.

Who blocks it

OAI-AdsBot is not in the 2026-10-09 survey: it was added to this directory after we last read the most-visited sites' robots.txt files, so we have no count for it yet.

Facts

Operator
OpenAI
Purpose
Unconfirmed by the operator

OpenAI documents it as the crawler that checks the landing pages of ads submitted for ChatGPT, and says it may also use landing-page content to decide when to show the ad. That is none of training, AI search or user fetch; OpenAI says the data it collects is not used to train generative AI foundation models.

Obeys robots.txt
Unconfirmed by the operator
In your server logs
The user-agent string contains "OAI-AdsBot/1.0".
How to verify it
Match the request's IP address against OpenAI's published OAI-AdsBot IP list.

Published list: openai.com/adsbot.json — 2 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 12 May 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them. To count real and fake OAI-AdsBot requests in your own server log against this list, drop the log into the log reader.

What OpenAI says

Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.

“OAI-AdsBot is used to validate the safety of web pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT.”

“When you submit an ad, OpenAI may visit the landing page to ensure it complies with our policies.”

“We may also use content from the landing page to determine when it’s most relevant to show the ad to users.”

“OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads, and the data collected by OAI-AdsBot is not used to train generative AI foundation models.”

“Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0;”

“Published IP addresses:”

Sources

Other crawlers from OpenAI

Same purpose, other operators

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