What is OAI-SearchBot?
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's web crawler that indexes websites for SearchGPT, collecting and analyzing web content to power AI-driven search results and real-time information retrieval in OpenAI's search applications. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | OpenAI |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
OAI-SearchBot revisits your site on a flexible schedule, often requesting several pages in a burst. Activity usually increases when your content changes or its index refreshes, with quiet intervals between crawl passes.
OAI-SearchBot's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot |
How To Block OAI-SearchBot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block OAI-SearchBot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI search crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/oai-searchbot
Disallow: /Global Statistics for OAI-SearchBot
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
14% of top websites block OAI-SearchBot in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Search Crawler Traffic
1.9% of all web traffic came from AI search crawlers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by OAI-SearchBot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block OAI-SearchBot?
Usually not. Blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps your pages out of its AI search results and can eliminate referral traffic from that channel. It does not improve traditional search rankings. For context, 14% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for OAI-SearchBot.
Does OAI-SearchBot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. OAI-SearchBot is expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether OAI-SearchBot respects it.
Does OAI-SearchBot Access Private Content?
No special access. OAI-SearchBot can reach only content available to anonymous visitors. Make sure staging sites and other sensitive areas require authentication.
Why Is OAI-SearchBot Visiting My Website?
OAI-SearchBot is updating an AI search index so your pages can appear in its results. It may have discovered your site through links, a sitemap, or mentions of your domain.
How Can I Tell if OAI-SearchBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from OAI-SearchBot and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using OAI-SearchBot's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "OAI-SearchBot". Look for bursts that follow links across several pages and recur over time. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be OAI-SearchBot.