What is GPTBot ?
GPTBot is the official web crawler operated by OpenAI. It is used to collect publicly available data to improve OpenAI’s models, including ChatGPT. The crawler is identified by the user-agent “GPTBot” and follows specific behavior guidelines outlined at https://openai.com/gptbot. It does not crawl content behind paywalls or content that requires logins. Data collected through GPTBot may be used in future versions of OpenAI’s language models.
Who is operating GPTBot ?
GPTBot is operated by OpenAI, a research and deployment company headquartered in San Francisco. OpenAI builds large-scale AI systems and provides APIs through its platform at platform.openai.com. The GPTBot crawler is part of its infrastructure for maintaining and improving generative models.
Why you should be interested in GPTBot ?
If your content is publicly accessible, it can be ingested by GPTBot unless explicitly blocked. This has implications for intellectual property, content control, and competitive reuse. OpenAI allows opting out via robots.txt, but without it, your content may directly inform future AI model behavior. Given the commercial and strategic value of content, this opt-out mechanism is critical to control.
How to block GPTBot ?
1. robots.txt File:
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file
# block ImagesiftBot User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /
2. Confirm bot activity:
Review your logs for the GPTBot user-agent to verify whether it’s already accessing your site.
3. No partial opt-out:
There is currently no way to allow indexing but disallow training. Blocking GPTBot is an all-or-nothing rule.
About the bot
Owner: OpenAI
Owner URL: openai.com
Bot URL: openai.com/gptbot
Bot User Agent: GPTBot
Respects robots.txt: Yes
