# 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

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot