ChatGPT-User: user agent, purpose, and whether to allow it
ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person asks ChatGPT or a Custom GPT a question, or when a GPT Action calls out. It does not crawl automatically.
Specification
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Live fetchFetches a page in real time because a person asked. Traffic here tracks human interest, not a crawl schedule. |
| Agent kind | FetcherFetches on a person's request. Appears in your logs. Request volume follows human activity. |
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot |
| robots.txt token | ChatGPT-User |
| robots.txt compliance | Operator states robots.txt may not apply (user initiated) |
| Verification | Published IP range filehttps://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json |
| Sends referral traffic | Yes |
| Attaches a citation | Yes |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | ai_answer |
| Source | Operator documentationhttps://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots |
| Verified on |
What blocking it costs you
OpenAI states that because these actions are user-initiated, robots.txt rules may not apply. ChatGPT-User does not govern whether content appears in ChatGPT search; use OAI-SearchBot for that. Hits from this agent indicate real people, so treat a spike as demand rather than crawl load.
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address ChatGPT-User only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Allow: /
Block ChatGPT-User
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /
Questions
What is the ChatGPT-User user agent?
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
Does ChatGPT-User respect robots.txt?
Operator states robots.txt may not apply (user initiated)
What does blocking ChatGPT-User cost me?
OpenAI states that because these actions are user-initiated, robots.txt rules may not apply. ChatGPT-User does not govern whether content appears in ChatGPT search; use OAI-SearchBot for that. Hits from this agent indicate real people, so treat a spike as demand rather than crawl load.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
Kymo classifies every crawler hit server-side using this registry, so ChatGPT-User shows up under OpenAI with its purpose attached. Read how crawler detection works, or run a free free AI visibility check to see what each crawler currently gets back from your server. No account needed for the check.