ChatGPT-User

ChatGPT-User is the user-agent OpenAI applies when ChatGPT fetches a specific page live, in real time, at a user's explicit request within a conversation, distinct from the background indexing done by GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot. It represents an on-demand fetch rather than a systematic crawl.

Why it matters

Blocking ChatGPT-User specifically prevents ChatGPT from opening a linked page a user asks it to read during a live conversation, a narrower and often overlooked decision separate from blocking the crawlers that build ChatGPT Search's general citation index.

Related terms

• GPTBot

  GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler for collecting web content used to train its models, operating separately from the crawlers OpenAI uses to power ChatGPT Search citations. A site can block GPTBot specifically to opt out of having its content used for model training, without affecting whether ChatGPT Search can still retrieve and cite that same content.

• OAI-SearchBot

  OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's separate crawler that indexes web content specifically for ChatGPT Search, building the retrieval pool that feature cites from, independent of the GPTBot crawler used for model-training data collection. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes a page from ChatGPT Search's citation pool without affecting training opt-outs.

• ChatGPT Search

  ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's web-grounded answer mode inside ChatGPT, which retrieves current web pages before generating a response and displays a source panel alongside the answer. It launched as a standalone feature in late 2024 and uses a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to build its citation index apart from GPTBot's model-training crawl.