ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is a live-fetch agent operated by OpenAI. It does not crawl the web on a schedule. It hits your site only when an end-user asks the underlying AI a question that requires fresh information from a specific page.
Traffic is bursty and unpredictable. A single trending topic can send hundreds of ChatGPT-User requests in an hour, then nothing for days. Each request typically reads one or two pages, not your whole site.
Allowing ChatGPT-User is how your content becomes part of OpenAI's answers. Blocking it means users asking that AI about your topic will be answered using someone else's content instead.
See ChatGPT-User on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
Known UA examples
example 1
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
Sometimes
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Burst, user-driven
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Varies
OpenAI runs 17 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Agentic Browser
8Live-Fetch AI
2- ChatGPT-UserYou are here
- ChatGPT-User/2.0
Agentic Commerce
2AI Search Index
1AI Coding Tool
1Link Unfurler
1Share of AI bot traffic
3.2%
↑ 33% vs 12 mo ago
% of top sites blocking it
40%
↑ 82% vs 12 mo ago
Top page categories crawled
Geographic origin of requests
Live-Fetch AIs as a category, share of all bot traffic
10%
↑ 135% vs 12 mo ago
Sum of every live-fetch ai we have public stats on. Compare to ChatGPT-User's individual trend above to see if it's pulling ahead of its category or falling behind.
Crawl-to-click ratio
210 : 1
For every 1,000 fetches, this agent sends ~4.8 human visits back. Cloudflare crawl-to-click data
Snapshot updated
2026-04
Connect Agent Analytics for daily, per-site numbers.
Should I let ChatGPT-User through?
In most cases, yes. Live-fetch agents drive citations inside AI answers. Allowing keeps your content in the conversation. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking ChatGPT-User affect my Google rankings?
No. ChatGPT-User fetches a page only when a user is actively asking OpenAI a question. It has nothing to do with how Google or Bing rank you. The cost of blocking is that OpenAI can't quote your content in its answer.
How do I confirm a request is really from ChatGPT-User?
Two checks. The User-Agent header should match a known ChatGPT-User string, and the request's source IP should fall inside OpenAI's published ranges. The User-Agent alone is trivially spoofable, so the IP check is what gives you confidence. OpenAI publishes the ranges so you can validate at the CDN or edge.
Does a ChatGPT-User visit count as a real user visit?
Sort of. There is a human asking OpenAI a question on the other end, but they never load your page in their own browser. They see whatever OpenAI quotes back, usually a snippet plus a citation link. Count it as upstream attention rather than as a session.
How is ChatGPT-User different from OpenAI's other bots?
OpenAI splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the OpenAI family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control ChatGPT-User?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.