`OAI-SearchBot`

Blocks visibilityverified against vendor docs 2026-08-27 · re-checked weekly

Gates ChatGPT search and shopping answers — opted-out sites are not shown in ChatGPT search answers (navigational links only).

The verdict

Blocking OAI-SearchBot costs real visibility — it is the crawler that feeds the surface, not a training bot.

0% of the 50 top DTC stores in Shelfgrade's weekly readiness panel currently block OAI-SearchBot (2026-W36).

robots.txt

Recommended: allow

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Costs visibility

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Identifying it in your logs

Published 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

Version segments drift — match on the OAI-SearchBot token, not the full string.

User-agent headers can be spoofed. OpenAI publishes the bot's real IP ranges at https://openai.com/searchbot.json — verify the requesting IP against that list.

Questions this page answers

What is OAI-SearchBot?

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler token. Gates ChatGPT search and shopping answers — opted-out sites are not shown in ChatGPT search answers (navigational links only). Source: the vendor's own crawler documentation (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots), last re-verified 2026-08-27.

Does blocking OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt hurt my store's AI visibility?

Blocking OAI-SearchBot costs real visibility — it is the crawler that feeds the surface, not a training bot.

What does the OAI-SearchBot user agent look like in server logs?

The vendor-published UA string is: 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 — note that version segments drift over time; match on the "OAI-SearchBot" token, not the full string.

How do I verify a request really came from OAI-SearchBot?

OpenAI publishes the bot's IP ranges as JSON at https://openai.com/searchbot.json — verify the requesting IP against that list rather than trusting the user-agent header, which anyone can spoof.

Primary source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots — every Shelfgrade rule links the vendor doc it derives from, re-verified weekly.

Other OpenAI crawlers: OAI-AdsBot · GPTBot · ChatGPT-User

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