Rattlesnakes By Mail

ChatGPT-User vs OAI-SearchBot

ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	ChatGPT-User	OAI-SearchBot	Comparison
cites_sources	not_documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	not_documented	not_documented	same
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	yes	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	user_fetch	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	partial	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 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	ChatGPT-User statement	OAI-SearchBot statement
cites_sources	OpenAI does not publish whether ChatGPT responses cite pages fetched by ChatGPT-User.	OAI-SearchBot surfaces crawled websites as links in ChatGPT search answers.
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	OAI-SearchBot first requested Rattlesnakes By Mail at 2026-09-13T21:41:14Z, before the Rattlesnakes By Mail sitemap was submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools shortly before 2026-09-15T08:38Z and to Google Search Console at 2026-09-15T09:00Z. OAI-SearchBot made 3 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, all 3 to /robots.txt.
purpose_documented	ChatGPT-User visits web pages for user actions in ChatGPT and in Custom GPTs.	OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT search features.
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.	OAI-SearchBot honours robots.txt opt-outs set for the OAI-SearchBot token.
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.	OAI-SearchBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot.

Sources