# 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. |

## Sources

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
- https://openai.com/gptbot.json