GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot

GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	GPTBot	OAI-SearchBot	Comparison
cites_sources	not documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	not_documented	not_documented	same
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	not documented	yes	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	training	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not documented	not_documented	different
respects_robots_txt	yes	yes	same
robots_txt_fetch_marker	yes	not documented	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	yes	same
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot	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	GPTBot statement	OAI-SearchBot statement
cites_sources	not documented	OAI-SearchBot surfaces crawled websites as links in ChatGPT search answers.
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	GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.	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_fetch_marker	OpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.	not documented
user_agent_string_full	GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.	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.