ChatGPT-User
Fetches made when a person asks ChatGPT to open your link
What ChatGPT-User does
ChatGPT-User is the fetch that happens when a person asks ChatGPT to open a link — pasting a URL, or asking it to go and read a page. It is not a crawl. There is one request because one human asked for one page.
OpenAI's documentation notes that because the request is initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply to it in the way they apply to a crawler. That is worth knowing before you decide it belongs in the same group as the others.
Its IP list is by far the largest of OpenAI's three, which follows from what it does: user-initiated fetches come from wherever the request is served, not from a small pool of crawl infrastructure.
Blocking it produces a specific and visible failure. Someone who pastes your URL into ChatGPT gets an error instead of your page, and it is your site that looks broken.
How to block ChatGPT-User
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain, alongside what is already there rather than replacing it.
robots.txt
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /What that costs you: Someone who pastes your URL into ChatGPT gets an error instead of your page.
To allow it instead, write nothing. A crawler with no group of its own follows your User-agent: * rules, and giving it a named group with Allow: / detaches it from those rules entirely — including any path you disallow there.
Find it in your logs
The short token is what robots.txt matches. This is what actually arrives in an access log, copied from OpenAI’s documentation. Version numbers move, so match on the token rather than the whole string.
User-agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/botTo find every visit it has made, and the addresses it came from:
Terminal
grep -F 'ChatGPT-User' /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnCheck that it is really ChatGPT-User
A user agent is a string the visitor chooses, so on its own it proves nothing — anyone can send yours. OpenAI publishes the addresses ChatGPT-User fetches from: 213 prefixes when we read the file, last changed on 11 September 2026. Take an address out of your logs and check it against that list.
Terminal
curl -s https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json | python3 -c "
import sys, json, ipaddress
addr = ipaddress.ip_address('203.0.113.10') # the address from your logs
nets = json.load(sys.stdin)['prefixes']
print(any(addr in ipaddress.ip_network(n.get('ipv4Prefix') or n['ipv6Prefix']) for n in nets))
"False means something else is wearing the name, and it is under no obligation to respect anything in your robots.txt. That is the traffic worth blocking at the edge, rather than the crawler that was asking politely.
What OpenAI says about it
Allow the IP ranges as well
OpenAI's own recommendation is not only to allow the token in robots.txt but to permit requests from its published IP ranges. A robots.txt that says yes and a firewall that says no is the most common reason a site is allowed on paper and absent in practice.
Read from https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots on 14 September 2026.
Should you block ChatGPT-User?
Rarely worth blocking. Every request is one person who asked for one of your pages, which is the most engaged traffic there is.
The honest case for blocking is cost: if each request is expensive to serve and you are seeing volume you did not expect, this is a lever. Measure the volume first, because most sites find it is a rounding error.
Note OpenAI's caveat that robots.txt may not apply to user-initiated fetches. If you need this stopped rather than discouraged, the enforcement point is your edge.
Questions
- Should I block ChatGPT-User?
- Rarely. It serves a person who has actively asked for your page, which is the most engaged traffic there is. The usual reason to block it is cost on a site where every request is expensive to serve.
The user agent and IP figures on this page were read from OpenAI’s own URLs on 14 September 2026. Blocking figures come from our survey of 170 well-known sites across 10 categories on 14 September 2026, 148 of which returned a readable robots.txt.
Is ChatGPT-User allowed on your site right now?
The checker reads your live robots.txt and reports every token in this directory, with the exact directive that decided each one.