ChatGPT-User: OpenAI's on-demand fetcher
ChatGPT's fetcher for pages a user or a custom GPT asks it to visit.
- Free, no account.
- A few seconds.
- Nothing is stored.
ChatGPT-User at a glance
Everything OpenAI documents about it, with links to the source.
- Operator
- OpenAI
- Type
- Fetches on a user's request
- Used for
- Pages a ChatGPT user asks it to open
- Obeys robots.txt
- Not always. OpenAI says that because ChatGPT-User fetches pages a user asked for, robots.txt rules may not apply. A rule still states your preference; to enforce it, block the published IP addresses at your firewall.
- 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 addresses
- openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
- Documentation
- developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
How to block ChatGPT-User
Opens a page because a person asked an assistant to read it. Blocking it stops those visits for the operators that honour robots.txt. Several say they may not, so a firewall rule is the real block.
Block the whole site
Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /
Block only some paths
List the paths; everything else stays open to ChatGPT-User.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /drafts/
robots.txt is a request ChatGPT-User may not follow. To enforce it, deny OpenAI's published IP addresses at your server or firewall.
How to verify ChatGPT-User
Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.
- 1
Find requests whose user agent contains "ChatGPT-User" in your server or CDN logs.
- 2
Check each source IP against OpenAI's published list (openai.com/chatgpt-user.json). A request from outside it is not ChatGPT-User, whatever it says.
- 3
Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.
Other crawlers from OpenAI
Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.
Frequently asked questions
ChatGPT's fetcher for pages a user or a custom GPT asks it to visit. OpenAI says that because these visits are started by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply, and that ChatGPT-User is not used to decide whether content appears in search.
Not always. OpenAI says that because ChatGPT-User fetches pages a user asked for, robots.txt rules may not apply. A rule still states your preference; to enforce it, block the published IP addresses at your firewall.
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site: "User-agent: ChatGPT-User" followed by "Disallow: /". To close only part of the site, list those paths instead of "/". To enforce the block rather than request it, deny the IP addresses OpenAI publishes at your firewall.
Because OpenAI treats these fetches as a user's own request and says robots.txt may not apply. If you need to stop them, block the crawler's IP addresses at the server or firewall.
Checked against OpenAI's documentation on 29 September 2026.
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