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ChatGPT-User

Handles user-initiated requests in ChatGPT, accessing external content to provide real-time information; not used for automated crawling or AI training.
OpenAIChatGPT-User
AI AssistantUser InitiatedAI (No Training)

What is ChatGPT-User?

ChatGPT-User appears when a person asks ChatGPT or a Custom GPT to use material from the web. OpenAI says ChatGPT may visit a page to answer the question and may include a link to that page in its response. This is a request-time fetcher, not OpenAI's automatic web crawler.

A visit is tied to an action inside ChatGPT. In access logs, that makes ChatGPT-User traffic evidence of a live retrieval rather than a scheduled indexing pass. The requested page still has to return usable content if ChatGPT is going to read it for that conversation.

OpenAI separates this job from ChatGPT Search. ChatGPT-User does not decide whether a page can appear in Search, and blocking it is not a Search opt-out. OAI-SearchBot is the control for search discovery. GPTBot has a separate role in model training.

ChatGPT-User is not used for automatic crawling or AI training. Its practical effect on AI answers is narrower: if a user-triggered request can reach a page, ChatGPT may use and link that page in the current response. Allowing the agent does not promise a citation, while denying it can stop that live fetch.

The ChatGPT-User token can be addressed in robots.txt, but OpenAI says those rules may not apply because the action came from a user. Cloudflare's bot directory likewise marks this agent as not following robots.txt. Treat a rule as a stated preference, not a reliable enforcement boundary.

Cloudflare's bot directory records the full user agent as Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot and links to OpenAI's bot documentation. OpenAI also publishes its current source addresses at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. Checking both the token and the published address is stronger than trusting a user-agent string alone.

Relevant for AI searchChatGPT

Is ChatGPT-User relevant for AI search?

Yes. ChatGPT-User feeds ChatGPT, so the pages it can reach shape what those AI products say about you.

ChatGPT-User crawls and indexes pages so the AI search or assistant behind it can retrieve them at answer time. A page it has never fetched cannot be quoted, summarized, or linked in that product's answers, so most sites keep it allowed to stay citable. Blocking it removes your pages from that AI surface and hands those citations to competitors.

Track ChatGPT-User with Promptwatch

Promptwatch classifies ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT-User) in real time from your server and CDN logs. See exactly when it visits, which pages it requests, the status codes it gets, and how those crawls map to AI citations. Requests are validated against the operator's published IP ranges to filter out spoofed user agents.

How to handle ChatGPT-User

Allow ChatGPT-User if people should be able to ask ChatGPT or a Custom GPT to retrieve your public pages. If that use is unwanted, you can publish the following rule:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

OpenAI does not guarantee that this user-triggered agent will honor the rule. Enforce a hard block at your CDN, WAF, or origin, and use OpenAI's published IP list when distinguishing genuine requests from copied user-agent strings. To opt out of ChatGPT Search indexing, configure OAI-SearchBot separately.

Examples

  • A support customer asks a Custom GPT to read a public troubleshooting article. The resulting ChatGPT-User request fetches that article for the current answer.
  • A publisher blocks request-time AI access at its WAF and verifies that a denied request came from an address in OpenAI's ChatGPT-User range.

Frequently asked questions about ChatGPT-User

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

A user action in ChatGPT or a Custom GPT triggers it. OpenAI may send the agent to a web page when that page can help answer the user's question.

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