Rattlesnakes By Mail

Claude-User vs OAI-SearchBot

Claude-User and OAI-SearchBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	Claude-User	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	user_fetch	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	yes	same
separate_search_and_training_tokens	not_documented	yes	different
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
user_fetch_exception_documented	no	not documented	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	Claude-User statement	OAI-SearchBot statement
cites_sources	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User.	OAI-SearchBot surfaces crawled websites as links in ChatGPT search answers.
honours_crawl_delay	Claude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages.	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.
purpose_documented	Claude-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude.	OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT search features.
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.	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.
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