ChatGPT-User: OpenAI's live-answer fetcher
ChatGPT-User is the fetcher ChatGPT sends when a person asks it a question and it opens a page to answer, or when a custom GPT runs an action.
Picked is an AI visibility tool for agencies and B2B SaaS teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the prompts your buyers ask, records which brands and pages they name, and writes the article built to become the source they quote.
At a glance
ChatGPT-User in one table
- Company
- OpenAI
- What it's for
- Live answer: fetched while answering someone's question.
- robots.txt token
ChatGPT-User- Full user agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot- Follows robots.txt
- May ignore it. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, because a person started the visit, and points to OAI-SearchBot for search opt-outs.
- How to verify
- Check the visitor's IP against the list OpenAI publishes. A request outside it isn't ChatGPT-User, whatever its user agent says. The IP list
- Source
- OpenAI's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
What to know
ChatGPT-User, in practice
Each ChatGPT-User request is a person asking ChatGPT something right now, and ChatGPT opening your page to answer. It isn't a crawl: OpenAI says it doesn't crawl automatically, and that robots.txt rules may not apply because a person asked.
It follows links from answers and from URLs people paste, so it lands on old and mistyped addresses more often than a crawler does. One redirect from each old URL keeps those answers from ending on a 404.
OpenAI publishes its addresses at openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. A request with this name from anywhere else isn't OpenAI, whatever it says.
Real data
What ChatGPT-User read on a real site
LaunchOn.it, our own launch platform, tracked in Picked through Cloudflare from September 12 to October 11, 2026. One site, so read it as an example, not an average.
621
Requests in 30 days
227
Different pages read
30 of 30
Days it came
73%
Verified by Cloudflare as the real bot
78% of its requests got a page back; 19% hit an address that doesn't exist.
- / (homepage)40%
- /_next/12%
- /products/8%
- /submit5%
- /api/5%
By the first folder of the address. /_next/ holds the site's scripts and images.
robots.txt
Allow ChatGPT-User
Allow it. Each visit is a person asking an AI something your page helps answer, right now. Blocking it costs you that answer wherever the bot honours the rule.
User-agent: ChatGPT-UserAllow: /Needed only if a wider rule blocks it: robots.txt lets every bot in by default. A bot named in its own group ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat your private paths there as Disallow lines. A block in your CDN or firewall has to be lifted there.
A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether ChatGPT-User reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
From OpenAI's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
ChatGPT-User is the fetcher ChatGPT sends when a person asks it a question and it opens a page to answer, or when a custom GPT runs an action.
OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, because a person started the visit, and points to OAI-SearchBot for search opt-outs.
Check the visitor's IP against the list OpenAI publishes. A request outside it isn't ChatGPT-User, whatever its user agent says.
Allow it. Each visit is a person asking an AI something your page helps answer, right now. Blocking it costs you that answer wherever the bot honours the rule.
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