OAI-SearchBot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by OpenAI.
OAI-SearchBot is used to link to and surface websites in search results in the SearchGPT prototype
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Sample user agent strings sent by OAI-SearchBot:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; robots.txt; +https://openai.com/searchbotMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbotAnyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Share of OAI-SearchBot requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 93% |
| Singapore | 1% |
| Belgium | 1% |
| Japan | 1% |
| The Netherlands | 1% |
| Microsoft Corporation AS8075 | 86% |
| Google LLC AS396982 | 14% |
OAI-SearchBot follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot group, OAI-SearchBot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.OAI-SearchBot from OAI-SearchBot's user agent; check OpenAI's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
OAI-SearchBot brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake OAI-SearchBot requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep OAI-SearchBot allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersOAI-SearchBot indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow OAI-SearchBot on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows OAI-SearchBot by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
OAI-SearchBot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by OpenAI. OAI-SearchBot is used to link to and surface websites in search results in the SearchGPT prototype
Yes. OAI-SearchBot follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the OAI-SearchBot user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "OAI-SearchBot" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so OAI-SearchBot may not follow it, and anyone can send OAI-SearchBot's user agent, so a fake OAI-SearchBot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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