ChatGPT-User vs GPTBot

ChatGPT-User and GPTBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

Field	ChatGPT-User	GPTBot	Comparison
cites_sources	not_documented	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	not_documented	not_documented	same
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	user_fetch	training	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not documented	different
respects_robots_txt	partial	yes	different
robots_txt_fetch_marker	not documented	yes	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	not_documented	yes	different
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	ChatGPT-User statement	GPTBot statement
cites_sources	OpenAI does not publish whether ChatGPT responses cite pages fetched by ChatGPT-User.	not documented
purpose_documented	ChatGPT-User visits web pages for user actions in ChatGPT and in Custom GPTs.	GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.
reads_llms_txt	OpenAI does not publish whether ChatGPT-User reads llms.txt files.	not documented
respects_robots_txt	ChatGPT-User fetches pages in response to user actions in ChatGPT, and OpenAI states that robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User fetches.	GPTBot honours robots.txt rules that webmasters set for the GPTBot token.
robots_txt_fetch_marker	not documented	OpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	OpenAI does not document ChatGPT-User as a search or training opt-out token.	OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training.
user_agent_string_full	ChatGPT-User sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot.	GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.