Kuldeep Paul

User-triggered fetch · OpenAI

ChatGPT-User

Fetches a page when a ChatGPT user or Custom GPT asks for it. It does not crawl automatically. Because a person initiates each request, OpenAI notes that robots.txt rules may not apply.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

9.6%of top sites fully block ChatGPT-User
549sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
73of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
OpenAI
Purpose
User-triggered fetch
Used for
ChatGPT, Custom GPTs, GPT Actions
Obeys robots.txt
Partial
robots.txt token
ChatGPT-User
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
IP list
openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
Official docs
developers.openai.com
Feeds
ChatGPT, ChatGPT Atlas

Block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

Blocking a search or user-triggered bot removes your pages from that assistant's answers. To opt out of model training only, block the operator's training crawler instead.

Well-known sites that block ChatGPT-User

amazon.com #30, yahoo.com #72, amazonvideo.com #85, msn.com #92, nytimes.com #163, cnn.com #195, bbc.com #216, sciencedirect.com #224, bbc.co.uk #236, nature.com #297, weibo.com #318, amazon.co.uk #326, espn.com #363, amazon.de #387, claude.ai #411, cnbc.com #474, amazon.co.jp #490, quora.com #491, usatoday.com #617, dailymail.com #619, telegraph.co.uk #629, amazon.fr #632, amazon.ca #633, techcrunch.com #634

Ranks from the Tranco list. Full per-site data in the robots.txt study.

Other OpenAI bots

GPTBot (model training) · OAI-SearchBot (ai search index) · OAI-AdsBot (ad verification) · ChatGPT Agent (ai agent)

Questions

What is ChatGPT-User?

ChatGPT-User is a user-triggered fetch bot operated by OpenAI, used for ChatGPT, Custom GPTs, GPT Actions. Fetches a page when a ChatGPT user or Custom GPT asks for it. It does not crawl automatically. Because a person initiates each request, OpenAI notes that robots.txt rules may not apply.

How do I block ChatGPT-User?

Add "User-agent: ChatGPT-User" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect.

Does ChatGPT-User respect robots.txt?

Partly. Because ChatGPT-User acts on a user's request, OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not always apply.

How many websites block ChatGPT-User?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 9.6% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed ChatGPT-User.

Analysis using this data

  1. Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
  2. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

← All AI crawlers

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/chatgpt-user), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's ChatGPT-User — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). ChatGPT-User — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/chatgpt-user

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "ChatGPT-User — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/chatgpt-user.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "ChatGPT-User — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/chatgpt-user.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026chatgptuser, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {ChatGPT-User — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/chatgpt-user}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/chatgpt-user">ChatGPT-User — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)