GPTBot
OpenAI documents GPTBot as a crawler that fetches public pages for model-related use. It is not the fetcher that answers a live chat, and it is not a person clicking a citation.
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Motif family
- openai
- Motif class
- Model-related crawler
- In Motif classifier
- Yes
- robots.txt
- Vendor documents that it honors robots.txt
- Executes JavaScript
- No
- Verified in Motif
- Published IP list. Motif does not check source IPs
What Motif will and will not claim
Motif classifies the token GPTBot as family openai, class model, when that User-Agent hits /m.js or the collector. Most GPTBot fetches are HTML-only and never reach Motif. Motif does not treat a User-Agent string as IP-verified identity.
Revenue
A GPTBot hit is not a visitor and cannot win a recommendation. Paying customers from OpenAI's chat product arrive as people with a chatgpt.com or chat.openai.com referrer.
Vendor documentation
Start with the vendor page at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots. IP ranges, when published, are at https://openai.com/gptbot.json. Motif stores the controlled token, not a proof that the remote IP sat in that list.
GPTBot User-Agent example
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot
Allow GPTBot in robots.txt
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
Block GPTBot in robots.txt
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
Does GPTBot count as a visit in Motif?
No. If GPTBot hits the Motif tracker or collector it increments AI crawlers. It does not create a visitor and cannot win a recommendation.
Will Motif show GPTBot on my HTML pages?
Only if that client requested /m.js or POST /v1/events. HTML-only crawls of the origin never reach Motif. Saying otherwise would be a product lie.
Should I block GPTBot?
Model-related crawlers are a data-policy call. Allowing or blocking them does not create Stripe customers. Motif will not pretend a crawler hit is demand.
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