Visits a web page when a user asks ChatGPT or a custom GPT a question that needs it.
Source: developers.openai.comOperator
OpenAI
Job
User-triggered fetch
Visits a page because a person asked a question that needs it. This is the visit that can end in a citation.
robots.txt
May ignore robots.txt on user requests
OpenAI says that because these visits are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.
Source: developers.openai.comMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain.
A crawler obeys only the most specific group that names it (RFC 9309), so a named group does not inherit the rules under User-agent: *. Repeat any paths you keep private, as the example does with /admin/.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Allow: / Disallow: /admin/
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /
OpenAI says this fetcher acts on a person's request and may not follow robots.txt. A block here states your preference; it may not stop the visit.
Read from the robots.txt we serve. We want AI engines to read and cite this site, so every AI crawler is allowed everywhere except the app, the API and the sign-in pages (/dashboard/, /api/, /login, /signup, /sign-in, /sign-up). The file also declares Content-Signal: ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Allow: / Disallow: /dashboard/ Disallow: /api/ Disallow: /login Disallow: /signup Disallow: /sign-in Disallow: /sign-up
See the whole file. The same rules repeat in every group, because a crawler that matches a named group ignores the wildcard one.
OpenAI says ChatGPT-User is not used to decide whether content appears in ChatGPT search. That is OAI-SearchBot's job.
Sources, checked 2026-09-24