AI crawler reference

ChatGPT-User: fetches a person asked for

ChatGPT-User is not a crawler. It fetches a page because someone in ChatGPT asked for that page, or because a Custom GPT called it. OpenAI states it is not used to crawl the web automatically, so traffic from it reflects real user interest rather than indexing.

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The facts

Taken from OpenAI's own documentation.

robots.txt token: ChatGPT-User
Operator: OpenAI
What it feeds: Live user fetch
Obeys robots.txt: Yes, per OpenAI's documentation for this agent.
User-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

What each choice costs

Neither option is free. This is the trade.

If you allow it

People using ChatGPT can open and read your pages when they ask it to, and Custom GPTs can reach your content.

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

If you block it

A person who explicitly asks ChatGPT to read your page gets told it cannot. This is a user-facing refusal rather than an indexing decision.

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

Deciding this alongside the other bots is easier in one place: build the whole file.

Worth knowing

Hits from this agent are a demand signal. Someone wanted that specific page badly enough to ask.
Blocking it affects people who already chose you, which is a different trade from blocking a training crawler.
It does not build an index, so allowing it has no bearing on whether you appear in ChatGPT search.

Verify it

A user-agent header proves nothing on its own, because anything can send one. OpenAI publishes the IP ranges its bots use, so a request is only genuine if the source IP appears there.

https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json OpenAI documentation