# 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. |

## Sources

- https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/adsbot.json
- https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-content-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler