Rattlesnakes By Mail

Claude-User vs GPTBot

Claude-User and GPTBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

FieldClaude-UserGPTBotComparison
cites_sourcesnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delayyesnot_documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documenteduser_fetchtrainingdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedyesdifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensnot_documentedyesdifferent
user_agent_string_fullnot_documentedMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotdifferent
user_fetch_exception_documentednonot documenteddifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsnot_documentednot_documentedsame

Differences

FieldClaude-User statementGPTBot statement
cites_sourcesAnthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User.not documented
honours_crawl_delayClaude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages.OpenAI does not publish whether GPTBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
purpose_documentedClaude-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude.GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.
reads_llms_txtAnthropic does not publish whether Claude-User reads llms.txt files.not documented
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedOpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.
separate_search_and_training_tokensAnthropic does not document Claude-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_fullAnthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-User.GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.
user_fetch_exception_documentedAnthropic applies the same robots.txt statement to Claude-User as to ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot and documents no exception for user-initiated fetches.not documented

Sources