ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person in ChatGPT (or a GPT, or an action) asks about it — "summarise this page", "what does this company do". Fetches a page because a person asked the assistant about it right now; blocking it makes you unreadable at the moment it matters.
ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person in ChatGPT (or a GPT, or an action) asks about it — "summarise this page", "what does this company do". It is a live read, one page at a time, not a crawl.
User-initiated fetch: fetches a page because a person asked the assistant about it right now; blocking it makes you unreadable at the moment it matters.
User-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/botrobots.txt token: ChatGPT-User. Documented: fetches on a user's behalf; OpenAI lists it as a user agent you can allow or block in robots.txt.
OpenAI publishes its IP ranges as a feed at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. A request claiming to be ChatGPT-User from an address outside those ranges is an impostor.
AI bot verifier → checks an IP and user-agent against the published ranges and reverse DNS, free.
Blocking ChatGPT-User means that when someone pastes your URL or asks ChatGPT about you, it cannot open the page. The answer is then built from other people's pages about you.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Check your site: the AI Crawler Access Check reads your robots.txt for ChatGPT-User and the other AI crawlers and fetches your homepage with each one's real user-agent — the CDN challenge that robots.txt cannot show.
Blocking ChatGPT-User means that when someone pastes your URL or asks ChatGPT about you, it cannot open the page. The answer is then built from other people's pages about you.
Add a group for it: User-agent: ChatGPT-User on one line and Allow: / on the next. If a User-agent: * group has a Disallow, the named group takes precedence for ChatGPT-User.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User then Disallow: /. Documented: fetches on a user's behalf; OpenAI lists it as a user agent you can allow or block in robots.txt.
OpenAI publishes its IP ranges as a feed at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. A request claiming to be ChatGPT-User from an address outside those ranges is an impostor.
The free crawler check reads your robots.txt per bot and fetches your homepage with each one's real user-agent.