# Claude-SearchBot vs OAI-SearchBot

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

| Field | Claude-SearchBot | OAI-SearchBot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not_documented | yes | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | yes | not_documented | different |
| observed_arrival_before_sitemap | not documented | yes | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | search | search | same |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | not_documented | same |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | yes | same |
| user_agent_string_full | not_documented | 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 | Claude-SearchBot statement | OAI-SearchBot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot. | OAI-SearchBot surfaces crawled websites as links in ChatGPT search answers. |
| honours_crawl_delay | Claude-SearchBot respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when crawling domains. | OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive. |
| 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. |
| user_agent_string_full | Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot. | 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://claude.com/crawling/bots.json
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot
- https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-content-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler