AI crawler · OpenAI · Ads checks and site-owner services
OAI-AdsBot: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
OAI-AdsBot is OpenAI's service crawler. Visits landing pages submitted as ChatGPT ads to check policy compliance and relevance. In our 13 October 2026 study, 93 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (4.0%) disallow OAI-AdsBot. Part of the AI crawler list.
What OAI-AdsBot does
Operator: OpenAI. Job: Ads checks and site-owner services. robots.txt behaviour not stated.
OAI-AdsBot user agent
robots.txt token: OAI-AdsBot (matched case-insensitively).
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbotrobots.txt: allow or block OAI-AdsBot
Allow
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /Block
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /Training only, not citations. Blocking it has no effect on AI answers or search citations.
Once a group names OAI-AdsBot, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block OAI-AdsBot
Disallow OAI-AdsBot in robots.txt
4.0%
93 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 93 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (4.0%) disallow OAI-AdsBot.
Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Method and CSV in the study.
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way OAI-AdsBot does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.
Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in
What it checks
- robots.txt for OAI-AdsBot
- Finds the group OAI-AdsBot obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
- What your CDN lets through
- Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
- Content without JavaScript
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.
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Questions
What is OAI-AdsBot?+
OAI-AdsBot is OpenAI's service crawler. Visits landing pages submitted as ChatGPT ads to check policy compliance and relevance.
What is OAI-AdsBot's user agent?+
OpenAI documents it as: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot. Match on the token OAI-AdsBot, since version numbers change.
How do I block OAI-AdsBot?+
Add "User-agent: OAI-AdsBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. robots.txt behaviour not stated, per OpenAI.
Does blocking OAI-AdsBot affect AI search citations?+
Blocking it has no effect on AI answers or search citations.
How many websites block OAI-AdsBot?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 93 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (4.0%) disallow OAI-AdsBot.