# 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. |

## Sources

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/gptbot.json
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot