# Claude-User vs GPTBot

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

| Field | Claude-User | GPTBot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not_documented | not documented | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | yes | not_documented | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | user_fetch | training | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | not documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| robots_txt_fetch_marker | not documented | yes | different |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | not_documented | yes | different |
| user_agent_string_full | not_documented | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot | different |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | no | not documented | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | not_documented | not_documented | same |

## Differences

| Field | Claude-User statement | GPTBot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User. | not documented |
| honours_crawl_delay | Claude-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_documented | Claude-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_txt | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude-User reads llms.txt files. | not documented |
| robots_txt_fetch_marker | not documented | OpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files. |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | Anthropic 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_full | Anthropic 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_documented | Anthropic 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

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