OpenAI · Indexing

OAI-SearchBot

Identify OAI-SearchBot by its user agent. Check request identity, review robots.txt controls and track visits in Aiola Analytics.

Download AiolaAI crawler directory

Key facts

User-agent token: OAI-SearchBot
Indexing: Crawled for AI or search indexing.
OpenAI publishes official IP ranges; verify requests against them.

What OAI-SearchBot is

OAI-SearchBot discovers and indexes pages so ChatGPT search can retrieve and cite current web results. Aiola classifies it as indexing because it supports a searchable retrieval index.

In Aiola's taxonomy, Indexing means crawled for ai or search indexing.

OAI-SearchBot user agent

Look for the match token inside the complete HTTP User-Agent header. Tokens can be spoofed, so use the network checks below for authentication.

Full example User-Agent
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; +https://openai.com/searchbot
Case-insensitive match token
OAI-SearchBot

Official IP ranges

OpenAI publishes an official IP range list. This cached snapshot contains 39 CIDR prefixes, last fetched 2026-10-23. Open the live source

Official IP range snapshot
104.210.140.128/28
13.66.216.176/28
135.234.64.0/24
172.182.193.224/28
172.182.193.80/28
172.182.194.144/28
172.182.194.32/28
172.182.195.48/28
172.182.209.208/28
172.182.211.192/28
172.182.213.192/28
172.182.224.0/28
172.203.190.112/28
172.203.190.128/28
172.203.190.80/28
20.14.99.96/28
20.168.18.32/28
20.169.6.224/28
20.169.7.48/28
20.169.77.0/25
20.171.123.64/28
20.171.53.224/28
20.25.151.224/28
20.42.10.176/28
23.102.145.48/28
4.227.36.0/25
40.67.175.0/25
40.90.214.16/28
51.8.102.0/24
74.7.175.128/25
74.7.228.0/25
74.7.228.128/25
74.7.229.0/25
74.7.229.128/25
74.7.230.0/25
74.7.241.128/25
74.7.242.128/25
74.7.243.0/25
74.7.244.0/25

Verify a OAI-SearchBot request

For OAI-SearchBot, compare the source IP from your trusted edge or server against OpenAI’s current published prefixes.

Test one CIDR in Python (replace REQUEST_IP)
python3 -c 'import ipaddress; print(ipaddress.ip_address("REQUEST_IP") in ipaddress.ip_network("104.210.140.128/28"))'

Test every current prefix in the vendor feed and re-fetch it regularly. This cached snapshot is evidence of publication, not a permanent firewall list.

Control OAI-SearchBot with robots.txt

OpenAI documents crawler controls for this bot family. Robots.txt can direct cooperative crawling, but it cannot prove that a request is authentic.

Allow OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
Block OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Read official crawler documentation

Aiola Analytics

See every OAI-SearchBot visit on your site

Aiola tracks 70 AI, search and link-preview crawlers next to your human traffic. See when OAI-SearchBot arrives, which pages it requests and how that changes over time. Hosted Analytics needs Pro or a trial.

Download AiolaSet up bot tracking
Aiola Analytics showing AI crawler visits by bot and page

Common questions

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