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 | July 31, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
OAI-SearchBot works like Googlebot with a less predictable calendar. Expect recurring crawls across your whole site, at a frequency that tracks how often your content changes and how much authority your site carries. Visits can cluster in bursts when its index refreshes.
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 Insights for OAI-SearchBot
As of July 31, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
12% 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?
No, for the same reason you would not block Googlebot. OAI-SearchBot indexes your site for an AI search engine, and its results link back to you. Blocking it removes you from a whole search channel without helping your traditional rankings. For comparison, 12% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for OAI-SearchBot.
Does OAI-SearchBot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. OAI-SearchBot is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms OAI-SearchBot actually follows it.
Does OAI-SearchBot Access Private Content?
No. OAI-SearchBot indexes what an anonymous visitor can load, like a traditional search crawler. The bigger risk is content that is public by accident, like a staging site, which it will happily index.
Why Is OAI-SearchBot Visiting My Website?
OAI-SearchBot is indexing your site so your pages can appear in its AI search results. It found you through links, your sitemap, or mentions of your domain, and it returns on its own schedule to keep the index fresh.
How Can I Tell if OAI-SearchBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks OAI-SearchBot visits and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper alongside it, then authenticates each visit against OAI-SearchBot's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "OAI-SearchBot". Look for recurring visits spread across your site, like a search engine crawl. A log match is still not proof, because any bot can claim to be OAI-SearchBot.