OpenAI’s crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features. It also says that sites which opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.
For a brand, that makes OAI-SearchBot the crawler that matters most for being cited by ChatGPT when it searches. It is controlled by your site’s robots.txt file, separately from OpenAI’s training crawler, GPTBot. A rule that blocks one does not name the other.
To allow it explicitly, add this to robots.txt:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
OpenAI notes that it can take about 24 hours after a robots.txt update for its systems to adjust for search results. Also check that a broad rule such as User-agent: * with Disallow: /, or a firewall setting, isn’t blocking it by accident.
You can check your own site in seconds with our free checker, or read robots.txt for AI crawlers.