OpenAI
ChatGPT-User
Documented Provider-maintained crawler reference.
ChatGPT-User identifies certain retrieval performed in response to a user's action in ChatGPT or a Custom GPT. OpenAI documents it separately from OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot and says robots.txt rules may not apply to these user-initiated actions, so a matching robots.txt group should not be presented as a guaranteed enforcement verdict.
Reference facts
- Provider
- OpenAI
- Provider identifier
- Neutral OpenForBots monogram
- robots.txt token
ChatGPT-User- Purpose
- User-triggered retrieval
- Crawls pages
- Yes
- Obeys robots.txt
- Unknown
- Search-visibility relevance
- Indirect
- Status
- active
- Information checked
What it controls
- A site can publish a ChatGPT-User group as an explicit robots.txt declaration, but OpenAI says user-initiated ChatGPT-User actions may not be governed by that rule.
- Interactive retrieval is a separate product path from background Search discovery and model-training crawling.
What it does not control
- OAI-SearchBot discovery or GPTBot model-training crawling.
- Whether ChatGPT will answer a question, cite the page, or use a third-party search result.
- Access to content protected by authentication or other real security controls.
Recommended policy notes
- Treat ChatGPT-User as a user-triggered retrieval agent, not as background search indexing or model-training crawling.
- OpenAI states that because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply; use OAI-SearchBot for Search opt-outs and automatic crawling policy.
Example policies
Record the declared ChatGPT-User policy with the provider caveat
# If you publish a ChatGPT-User group, treat it as declared site policy rather than guaranteed enforcement.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /OpenAI states that robots.txt rules may not apply to user-initiated ChatGPT-User actions. Protect non-public content with real access controls.
Common misconceptions
- ChatGPT-User is the same crawler as GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot.
- A ChatGPT-User Allow or Disallow rule is guaranteed to control every user-requested fetch.
How OpenForBots evaluates it
- Parses any robots.txt group that names ChatGPT-User and can show the matching directive as site-declared policy evidence.
- Does not convert that syntactic match into a claim that OpenAI will enforce it for user-initiated retrieval, because OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply.
- Labels the result separately from OpenAI Search and training findings and does not impersonate a real user workflow.
Limitations
- OpenAI states that robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User because the actions are initiated by a user.
- A robots.txt evaluation therefore cannot establish whether a particular ChatGPT-User request will be allowed or blocked in production.
- A user-agent header can be spoofed and does not authenticate a requester.
- Network, WAF, authentication, consent, and product-level restrictions may still affect retrieval.
Related context