OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as search indexing for ChatGPT search. Blocking it is closer to blocking a search crawler than blocking a training crawler.
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Motif family
- openai
- Motif class
- Search indexing
- 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 OAI-SearchBot as family openai, class search, on tracker or collector hits. Indexing of the founder's HTML that never loads /m.js is out of scope.
Revenue
Citations this bot enables may later produce a person. Motif ranks that person, if they pay, on the chatgpt first-touch channel, not on the crawler series.
Vendor documentation
Start with the vendor page at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots. IP ranges, when published, are at https://openai.com/searchbot.json. Motif stores the controlled token, not a proof that the remote IP sat in that list.
OAI-SearchBot User-Agent example
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbotAllow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Does OAI-SearchBot count as a visit in Motif?
No. If OAI-SearchBot hits the Motif tracker or collector it increments AI crawlers. It does not create a visitor and cannot win a recommendation.
Will Motif show OAI-SearchBot 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 OAI-SearchBot?
Search-index bots are how some assistants find pages to cite. Blocking them is a discovery policy, not a ranking in Motif. User-requested fetchers and model crawlers are separate decisions.