Kuldeep Paul

Ad verification · OpenAI

OAI-AdsBot

Visits landing pages submitted as ChatGPT ads to check policy compliance and relevance. It only visits submitted ad URLs, and OpenAI says the data is not used for model training. Pages that block it or require login can fail ad review.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

4.2%of top sites fully block OAI-AdsBot
239sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
43of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
OpenAI
Purpose
Ad verification
Used for
ChatGPT Ads
Obeys robots.txt
Not applicable
robots.txt token
OAI-AdsBot
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot
IP list
openai.com/adsbot.json
Official docs
developers.openai.com
Feeds
ChatGPT

Block OAI-AdsBot in robots.txt

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /

Well-known sites that block OAI-AdsBot

ebay.com #191

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) · ChatGPT-User (user-triggered fetch) · ChatGPT Agent (ai agent)

Questions

What is OAI-AdsBot?

OAI-AdsBot is a ad verification bot operated by OpenAI, used for ChatGPT Ads. Visits landing pages submitted as ChatGPT ads to check policy compliance and relevance. It only visits submitted ad URLs, and OpenAI says the data is not used for model training. Pages that block it or require login can fail ad review.

How do I block OAI-AdsBot?

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

Does OAI-AdsBot respect robots.txt?

OpenAI has not clearly documented whether OAI-AdsBot honours robots.txt.

How many websites block OAI-AdsBot?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 4.2% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed OAI-AdsBot.

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/oai-adsbot), 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 OAI-AdsBot — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). OAI-AdsBot — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/oai-adsbot

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "OAI-AdsBot — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/oai-adsbot.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "OAI-AdsBot — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/oai-adsbot.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026oaiadsbot, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {OAI-AdsBot — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/oai-adsbot}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/oai-adsbot">OAI-AdsBot — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)