OAI-SearchBot: The Crawler That Decides If ChatGPT Can Recommend You

OAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler that surfaces and links to sites in ChatGPT's search and shopping answers. If you block it, you remove your store from ChatGPT's results — even though it has nothing to do with model training. Here's the user-agent, what it does, and the robots.txt to keep it open.

OpenAI runs three crawlers, and merchants routinely block the wrong one. GPTBot is the famous one, but it's for model training. The crawler that actually determines whether ChatGPT can find and recommend your store is OAI-SearchBot — and it's the one you most want to let in.

What OAI-SearchBot is

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot

OAI-SearchBot indexes the open web so ChatGPT can surface and link to pages when it answers a question — including shopping questions. It is not a training crawler and it is not the live, user-triggered fetcher (that's ChatGPT-User). Its one job is search visibility: being in the index ChatGPT draws on when it names stores and products.

For a store that wants AI-driven traffic, this is the single most important bot to be reachable by.

What happens if you block it

If your robots.txt disallows OAI-SearchBot, you are telling ChatGPT it may not include you in its search and shopping results. You can block GPTBot to opt out of training and still be fully visible in answers — but blocking OAI-SearchBot is opting out of the answers themselves. It's the most expensive accidental block there is for an e-commerce store.

The robots.txt that keeps you visible

# Let ChatGPT surface and link to your store in search/shopping
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

# Let ChatGPT open your page when a shopper asks about you
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

# Model training — your call; this one has a real tradeoff
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

Opting out of training only? Set the GPTBot block to Disallow: / and leave the first two open.

Check what you're actually allowing

A broad Disallow, a wildcard user-agent, or a leftover SEO-plugin rule can block OAI-SearchBot without you realising. Test it by name:

• Run your store through the AI crawler & robot checker — it reports, per bot, whether OAI-SearchBot and the rest can reach you.
• Scan your store's AI readiness — crawler access is one of several things that decide whether ChatGPT can read and recommend your products.

See also: GPTBot and OpenAI's other crawlers · the complete AI crawler & user-agent list.

FoundGPT helps Shopify stores get read, recommended and sold by AI engines. Start with a free AI-readiness scan.