OAI-AdsBot
OAI-AdsBot is OpenAI's fetcher for pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT. OpenAI says it visits only those pages, to confirm policy compliance and judge when to show the ad, and does not use the data to train generative AI foundation models. OpenAI documents no robots.txt token and no reverse DNS method; verification uses the IP range file at openai.com/adsbot.json.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbotWhat OAI-AdsBot does
OpenAI publishes a full user agent string for this bot, Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot. Visits are limited to pages someone submitted as an ad landing page on ChatGPT. When an ad is submitted, OpenAI may fetch the landing page to confirm it complies with OpenAI's policies, and it may use the page content to decide when the ad is most relevant to show to users. OpenAI states the bot visits only pages submitted as ads, so OpenAI's own wording ties any visit to a submitted ad.
The control picture is thin. OpenAI's bots page names no robots.txt token for OAI-AdsBot and says nothing about whether it reads robots.txt, so site owners have no documented way to opt out through that file. OpenAI does state that data collected by OAI-AdsBot is not used to train generative AI foundation models. Blocking it at the network level would stop the validation visit OpenAI describes for an ad that points to your page; since the bot only visits pages submitted as ads, allowing it has no documented effect on pages that were never submitted. Whether it executes JavaScript is undocumented.
Verification rests on the IP range file OpenAI publishes at openai.com/adsbot.json. The file is a JSON object with a creationTime field and a prefixes array of ipv4Prefix entries. OpenAI documents no reverse DNS suffix, so a matching user agent string without a source IP inside those prefixes is not verified.
Operator note. OpenAI lists OAI-AdsBot on its official crawler documentation page alongside its other bots. The documentation says nothing about robots.txt handling for this bot. The documentation does not say whether OAI-AdsBot executes JavaScript.
Controlling OAI-AdsBot with robots.txt
Use the token undocumented in robots.txt. OpenAI's documentation does not state whether this bot honors robots.txt.
User-agent: undocumented
Disallow: /User-agent: undocumented
Allow: /Verifying a request is really OAI-AdsBot
Anyone can put OAI-AdsBot in a User-Agent header. OpenAI publishes IP ranges for OAI-AdsBot at https://openai.com/adsbot.json. No reverse-DNS method is documented.
OpenAI publishes a machine-readable list. Our probe read it on 2026-09-06; the file's own creation time was 2026-05-12.
- Prefixes
- 2
- IPv4
- 2
- IPv6
- 0
First entries at fetch time: 130.131.229.128/25, 20.168.90.128/25
SHA-256 of the fetched body: 460b800ffb026c5ec1b9540d285f2ade8e1c4a654e65dae315e2bae650b5d74d
Common questions
Should I block OAI-AdsBot?
OpenAI says the bot only visits pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT, to check that the landing page complies with its policies and to decide when the ad is most relevant to show. Blocking it would stop that validation for an ad pointing at your page. If no one has submitted your pages as ads, OpenAI's documentation gives no reason to expect visits at all.
Does OAI-AdsBot respect robots.txt?
The operator's documentation does not say. OpenAI's bots page lists no robots.txt token for OAI-AdsBot and makes no statement about robots.txt handling, so there is no documented way to opt out through that file. OpenAI does state that data the bot collects is not used to train generative AI foundation models.
How do I verify OAI-AdsBot?
Compare the source IP with the prefixes in https://openai.com/adsbot.json, the only verification method OpenAI documents. OpenAI publishes no reverse DNS suffix for this bot, so the user agent string alone does not confirm origin.
Sources
Every fact on this page was checked against OpenAI's own documentation, listed below, and re-checked by a second reviewer before publication. Reviewed September 2026.
Related crawlers
This registry documents how operators describe their own bots so site owners can identify and control them. It does not publish third-party IP lists or guess at undocumented behaviour. To see how your own site responds to automated visitors, the bot detection scanner reads a URL's live response and names the protection it finds.