Should you block OAI-AdsBot? OpenAI's ad-review crawler
OAI-AdsBot is operated by OpenAI. It visits the landing pages of ads submitted to ChatGPT, to check them against OpenAI's ad policies and to judge when each ad is relevant to show. It visits no other pages.
Who should block OAI-AdsBot, and who should not?
If you advertise in ChatGPT, keep it open on your landing pages, at the CDN and firewall as well as in robots.txt: it is how OpenAI reviews the page your ad sends people to. If you do not advertise, it should only arrive when someone else submits an ad that links to your page. A request that names OAI-AdsBot from an address outside adsbot.json did not come from OpenAI. Because OpenAI does not say the bot reads robots.txt, a firewall rule on the user agent and the IP list is the only way to refuse it that does not depend on OpenAI.
The verified facts
| User-agent token | OAI-AdsBot/1.0 |
|---|---|
| Full user agent in logs | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot |
| Operator | OpenAI |
| Purpose | Other product crawlers |
| Honors robots.txt | Not documented. The operator does not say whether it honors robots.txt. |
| Published IP ranges | openai.com/adsbot.json |
What does OpenAI’s documentation add?
- OpenAI says OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT. When an ad is submitted, OpenAI may visit its landing page to check that it complies with OpenAI's policies.
- OpenAI may also use content from the landing page to decide when the ad is most relevant to show to users.
- OpenAI says the data OAI-AdsBot collects is not used to train generative AI foundation models.
- OpenAI's page names OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot as its robots.txt controls and does not say whether OAI-AdsBot reads robots.txt.
- On 2026-09-26 adsbot.json listed two IPv4 ranges, both /25, in a file dated 2026-05-12.
How do you block OAI-AdsBot?
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
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 robots.txt compliance is unverified for this bot, a robots.txt line is a request, not an enforcement. Enforcement requires blocking at the CDN or firewall using the verification data on this page.
How do you tell a real OAI-AdsBot request from a fake one?
A user-agent match proves nothing, since any client can send OAI-AdsBot/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 OAI-AdsBot cost you?
OpenAI does not say. The crawler only reviews pages submitted as ChatGPT ads, so a block can only affect ads that point at your pages.
What else does OpenAI document?
OpenAI also documents GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, 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 OAI-AdsBot does nothing to crawlers with other tokens. In the same group, the directory also covers GoogleOther (Google), FacebookExternalHit (Meta), Meta-ExternalAds (Meta), Amazonbot (Amazon) and ImagesiftBot (ImageSift (Hive)), each with its own token and its own documented cost of blocking.