Definition
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's web crawler dedicated to retrieving content for ChatGPT search (the browsing feature), distinct from GPTBot which collects data for model training. The user-agent string is OAI-SearchBot; OpenAI publishes its IP ranges for verification. The distinction matters for robots.txt policy: many publishers block GPTBot (training) while allowing OAI-SearchBot (search) — this keeps content out of future model training but visible when ChatGPT users browse the web for answers. If you block OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT search cannot retrieve your pages in real time, which means you lose citation eligibility for browsed queries even if your content was in the training data. Verify real OAI-SearchBot traffic by checking source IPs against OpenAI's published ranges; user-agent strings alone can be spoofed. Review your robots.txt quarterly as OpenAI may introduce additional search-facing crawlers.