OAI-SearchBot

ai-fetchersearch-engine OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI search web crawler bot

About this crawler

OAI-SearchBot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern OAI-SearchBot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as ai-fetcher, search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block OAI-SearchBot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

3.9%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: OAI-SearchBot
2026-05-012026-06-045.0%

Technical details

Name
OAI-SearchBot
Pattern
OAI-SearchBot
Tags
ai-fetcher, search-engine
Reference
https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
Added
2024/09/24
rDNS suffixes
.openai.com
Instances
1 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely OAI-SearchBot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

Sample User-Agent strings

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

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow OAI-SearchBot:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} OAI-SearchBot [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "OAI-SearchBot") { return 403; }
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