8.1%
of the world's top 1,000 sites block OAI-SearchBot
2.8%
of India's top 1,000 sites block OAI-SearchBot
From our study of 2,000 sites, 20 October 2026.
Allow or block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain text file at the top of your site (yoursite.com/robots.txt). Add one of these groups. If OAI-SearchBot isn't mentioned at all, it follows your rules for all crawlers.
To allow it
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: /
To block it
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /
Not the same as GPTBot. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Blocking one doesn't block the other. See GPTBot.
Questions
What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is run by OpenAI. Finds websites to show in ChatGPT search answers.
Should I block OAI-SearchBot?
Allow it if you want to be found and cited in AI answers. Blocking it keeps your pages out of that assistant's search answers. It doesn't change your Google rankings.
How do I block OAI-SearchBot?
Add "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the top of your site. To allow it, use "Allow: /" instead, or simply don't mention it.
Is OAI-SearchBot the same as GPTBot?
No. They're separate. Blocking one doesn't block the other, so check both lines in your robots.txt.
Other crawlers of this kind: Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot. All crawlers.