Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
OpenAI publishes the IP ranges OAI-SearchBot uses. A request with this user agent from any other address is not OAI-SearchBot. The zoo checks every visit against that list. Read OpenAI's documentation.
How to block OAI-SearchBot
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from OAI-SearchBot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block OAI-SearchBot from the whole site User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
Requests that use OAI-SearchBot's name but fail OpenAI's network check are filed separately, as impostors. These are the visits that passed, or that could not be checked at the time:
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Questions site owners ask
Does OAI-SearchBot respect robots.txt?
We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.
Will blocking OAI-SearchBot hurt my search rankings?
Not in Google or Bing. It may stop your pages appearing in ChatGPT search results.
How often does OAI-SearchBot visit?
Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.