# GoogleOther vs OAI-SearchBot

GoogleOther and OAI-SearchBot compared on 13 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | GoogleOther | OAI-SearchBot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not documented | yes | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | no | not_documented | different |
| observed_arrival_before_sitemap | not documented | yes | different |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | no | not documented | different |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | yes | not documented | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | mixed | search | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not documented | not_documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| robots_txt_token | GoogleOther | not documented | different |
| 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 |
| verifiable_by_rdns | yes | not_documented | different |

## Differences

| Field | GoogleOther statement | OAI-SearchBot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not documented | OAI-SearchBot surfaces crawled websites as links in ChatGPT search answers. |
| honours_crawl_delay | Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for GoogleOther. | 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. |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | GoogleOther made 93 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z and fetched /robots.txt on none of those requests. GoogleOther's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail was the home page at 2026-09-14T12:03:30Z. | not documented |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | GoogleOther requested the /mcp endpoint of Rattlesnakes By Mail twice between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, at 2026-09-14T15:07:30Z and at 2026-09-14T18:27:49Z. Rattlesnakes By Mail returned status 405 to both GoogleOther requests for /mcp. | not documented |
| purpose_documented | GoogleOther is a generic crawler that Google product teams use to fetch publicly accessible content from sites. | OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT search features. |
| reads_llms_txt | not documented | OpenAI does not publish whether OAI-SearchBot reads llms.txt files. |
| robots_txt_token | The robots.txt token for GoogleOther is GoogleOther. | not documented |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | Google does not document whether content fetched by GoogleOther is used for Gemini training. | OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training. |
| user_agent_string_full | not documented | 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. |
| verifiable_by_rdns | GoogleOther requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com. | OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for OAI-SearchBot. |

## Sources

- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googleother
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot