AI crawler reference
OAI-AdsBot: ad safety checks
OAI-AdsBot checks the safety of web pages submitted as advertisements on ChatGPT. It plays no part in training, indexing or answering, so for a site that does not advertise on ChatGPT it is the least consequential entry in OpenAI's set.
The facts
Taken from OpenAI's own documentation.
- robots.txt token
- OAI-AdsBot
- Operator
- OpenAI
- What it feeds
- Ad safety
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. OpenAI documents robots.txt as the control for it.
- User-agent string
- Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot
What each choice costs
Neither option is free. This is the trade.
If you allow it
Pages you submit as ads on ChatGPT can be checked, which that process requires.
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot Allow: /
If you block it
Ad review of your pages may fail. Nothing about organic visibility changes either way.
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot Disallow: /
Deciding this alongside the other bots is easier in one place: build the whole file.
Worth knowing
- This is the newest token in OpenAI's set, so older robots.txt files written for AI bots do not mention it at all.
- It has no bearing on organic answers, so there is no visibility argument for allowing it.
- If you do run ads on ChatGPT, blocking it works against you.
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.
Questions
Do we need to allow it?
Only if you advertise on ChatGPT. It has no role in organic answers.
Does blocking it affect ChatGPT search?
No. Search eligibility comes from OAI-SearchBot alone.
Why is it not in our robots.txt?
It was published later than the others, so most AI robots.txt rules predate it.
The engine it serves
Guides that cover this
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