Claude-SearchBot vs OAI-AdsBot

Claude-SearchBot and OAI-AdsBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

Field	Claude-SearchBot	OAI-AdsBot	Comparison
cites_sources	not_documented	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	yes	not_documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	search	ads	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not documented	different
respects_robots_txt	yes	not_documented	different
scope_of_crawling	not documented	limited to submitted ad landing pages	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	not_documented	different
user_agent_string_full	not_documented	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	Claude-SearchBot statement	OAI-AdsBot statement
cites_sources	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot.	not documented
honours_crawl_delay	Claude-SearchBot respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when crawling domains.	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-AdsBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
purpose_documented	Claude-SearchBot analyses online content to improve the relevance and accuracy of Claude search responses.	OAI-AdsBot visits landing pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT to check compliance with OpenAI policies.
reads_llms_txt	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude-SearchBot reads llms.txt files.	not documented
respects_robots_txt	Claude-SearchBot honours industry standard robots.txt directives that signal do not crawl.	OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-AdsBot honours robots.txt disallow rules.
scope_of_crawling	not documented	OAI-AdsBot visits only pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Anthropic separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: Claude-SearchBot for search and ClaudeBot for training.	OpenAI does not document OAI-AdsBot as part of a search and training token split.
user_agent_string_full	Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot.	OAI-AdsBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot.