OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler that indexes web pages for ChatGPT's search features, so a site that blocks it can't be fetched or linked when ChatGPT searches the web, and it is separate from GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler.
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to build and refresh the index that ChatGPT's search features draw from. When someone asks ChatGPT for an emergency plumber in Scottsdale and it searches the web to answer, the pages it can consider are the ones OAI-SearchBot has been allowed to read. OpenAI documents it as distinct from GPTBot, which gathers training data, and from ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page when a user asks about a specific link.
That separation matters because it changed how ChatGPT sources answers. Early on, ChatGPT's browsing leaned on third-party search results. OpenAI now runs its own crawler and index through OAI-SearchBot, so ChatGPT is no longer a straight passthrough to another search engine. If you've read that ChatGPT's citations come from Bing, that's a conflation of two separate studies. Ahrefs, analyzing 1.4 million prompts in February 2025, found 88% of the URLs ChatGPT cited came from its general web-search retrieval rather than its news, Reddit, YouTube, or academic sources, and that study never mentions Bing.
Seer Interactive did separately find, across 100 queries in February 2025, that 87% of SearchGPT's citations matched Bing's top organic results. Matched is not sourced from. Overlap between two indexes of the same web is expected. The practical lesson is that ChatGPT has its own crawler, and that crawler needs to be able to read your site.
For a restaurant or law firm, the check takes a minute: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for a rule blocking OAI-SearchBot, or a blanket rule blocking all bots. Also check whether your CDN or firewall has an AI-bot block enabled, since some turn that on by default for new sites. Either one means ChatGPT search can't cite your pages, no matter how well written they are.
Tibly's AI-readiness audit reads your robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and the other AI crawlers and reports which ones are allowed. A Tibly-hosted site allows all crawlers by default and publishes a sitemap they can follow.
Keep exploring the glossary
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting publicly available content to train its AI models, identified by the user-agent string GPTBot and controllable through robots.txt, and it is separate from OAI-SearchBot, which powers ChatGPT's search answers.
- AI CrawlerAn AI crawler is an automated bot such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended that fetches web pages so an AI company can train its models or retrieve current information to answer user questions.
- robots.txt for AI Crawlersrobots.txt for AI crawlers means using the robots.txt file at your site's root to allow or block named AI bots such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, deciding which AI systems may read your pages for training or live answers.
- CrawlabilityCrawlability is how easily automated bots from search engines and AI companies can discover, fetch, and read the pages on a website, determined by robots.txt rules, server responses, HTTPS, sitemaps, and whether content is visible without running JavaScript.
Common questions about OAI-SearchBot
- Does ChatGPT get its search results from Bing?
- Not anymore, and it's a common mistake. OpenAI runs its own crawler and index through OAI-SearchBot. Seer Interactive found 87% of SearchGPT citations matched Bing's top results in early 2025, but matching isn't sourcing. Copilot is the engine that genuinely runs on Bing's index.
- What's the difference between OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot?
- OAI-SearchBot indexes pages for ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot collects content for model training. Per OpenAI's documentation they follow separate robots.txt rules, so you can block training while staying visible in search, or the reverse. Most local businesses want OAI-SearchBot allowed regardless of what they decide about GPTBot.
- How do I check whether OAI-SearchBot can read my site?
- Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for a User-agent: OAI-SearchBot block or a wildcard rule that disallows everything. Then fetch your homepage with the OAI-SearchBot user-agent string and confirm you get a page rather than a 403. Tibly's AI-readiness audit runs both checks for you.