Should you block ChatGPT-User? OpenAI's live-fetch agent
ChatGPT-User is operated by OpenAI. It fetches pages on demand when a user's request needs them, so what it reads feeds live answers and citations rather than a training set.
Who should block ChatGPT-User, and who should not?
A robots.txt block is a weak lever here: OpenAI says the rule may not apply, and each visit comes from a person's question. Leave it open for public pages. If a section must stay out of ChatGPT sessions, put it behind a login. If you must refuse the traffic, match the published IP list at the CDN, knowing you are turning away a reader's request, not a crawler. To leave ChatGPT search, block OAI-SearchBot instead.
The verified facts
| User-agent token | ChatGPT-User/1.0 |
|---|---|
| Full user agent in logs | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot |
| Operator | OpenAI |
| Purpose | Live retrieval and user-request fetchers |
| Honors robots.txt | Partly. The operator says that some requests may bypass robots.txt. |
| Published IP ranges | openai.com/chatgpt-user.json |
What does OpenAI’s documentation add?
- It visits a page when a ChatGPT or Custom GPT user's question needs it, and for GPT Actions. OpenAI says it is not used for automatic crawling.
- Because a user started the action, OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply.
- OpenAI says it is not used to decide whether content may appear in Search; OAI-SearchBot handles search opt-outs.
How do you block ChatGPT-User?
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /Once you give a crawler its own group, it stops reading your User-agent: * rules, so run the whole file through the AI crawler robots.txt tester before you deploy it.
Because this bot may bypass some robots.txt directives, the rule does not enforce every request. Enforcement requires blocking at the CDN or firewall using the verification data on this page.
How do you tell a real ChatGPT-User request from a fake one?
A user-agent match proves nothing, since any client can send ChatGPT-User/1.0. Check the IP against the published range file above, re-fetched on a schedule. A request that fails is not OpenAI. The log verification guide has a script for the IP check and a worked reverse-DNS example, or paste the IP into the AI crawler IP verifier, which runs these checks against OpenAI’s current data.
What does blocking ChatGPT-User cost you?
ChatGPT users cannot have ChatGPT open your pages, if the block holds. OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply to these user-initiated visits.
What else does OpenAI document?
OpenAI also documents GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and OAI-AdsBot, each with its own robots.txt token. How OpenAI’s crawlers fit together.
Which crawlers in the same group should you decide on at the same time?
A robots.txt group for ChatGPT-User does nothing to crawlers with other tokens. In the same group, the directory also covers Claude-User (Anthropic), Perplexity-User (Perplexity), meta-externalfetcher (Meta), Amzn-User (Amazon) and MistralAI-User (Mistral), each with its own token and its own documented cost of blocking.