OAI-AdsBot: the agent that checks ChatGPT ad landing pages

Operator

OpenAI

Type

Ad landing page checker

robots.txt token

OAI-AdsBot

Follows robots.txt

No, per OpenAI's documentation

Used for

Checking the landing pages of ads submitted to run in ChatGPT

User agent

User agent contains OAI-AdsBot/1.0

How to verify

Match the user agent and confirm the traffic lines up with ad submissions you made

What is OAI-AdsBot?

When an advertiser submits an ad that links to a page, OpenAI needs to look at that page, the same way ad platforms have always checked landing pages for policy and quality. OAI-AdsBot is the agent that makes those visits.

If you do not advertise in ChatGPT, and nobody runs ads pointing at your URLs, you should rarely or never see it. If you do run ads, expect a small number of visits to the exact landing pages you submitted.

What happens if you block OAI-AdsBot?

Blocking OAI-AdsBot through robots.txt has no effect, since OpenAI says it does not follow those rules for this purpose. Blocking it at the firewall would prevent the review of your landing pages, which can stop your ads from running. It has no connection to organic visibility in ChatGPT.

Should you allow OAI-AdsBot?

Leave it alone. If you advertise, it needs access. If you do not, it has no reason to visit, and a request claiming to be OAI-AdsBot on pages that are not ad landing pages deserves a closer look as possible spoofing.

Check whether OAI-AdsBot can reach your site

Enter your domain or a specific page. The checker reads your live robots.txt, picks the group OAI-AdsBot would use, and applies the longest matching rule, the same way major crawlers resolve conflicts.

robots.txt rules for OAI-AdsBot

Put each group in the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. User agent names are matched without regard to case, and the most specific matching group wins.

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Allow: /

The rule most people get wrong: once OAI-AdsBot has its own group, it ignores everything under User-agent: *. If your wildcard group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines inside the OAI-AdsBot group too.

Because OAI-AdsBot is not reliably governed by robots.txt, a robots.txt rule states your preference but does not enforce it. To enforce a block, add a firewall rule. On Cloudflare, a custom WAF rule with this expression and the Block action does it:

(http.user_agent contains "OAI-AdsBot")

Common OpenAI setup: appear in ChatGPT search, opt out of training

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

How to verify real OAI-AdsBot traffic

Match the user agent, then check that the requested URLs are pages you submitted as ad destinations. Exclude these visits from conversion and engagement reports, the same way you would exclude ad review traffic from other platforms, so they do not distort landing page metrics.

To see how often it visits, count requests by user agent in your access log. On a typical Nginx server:

grep -i "OAI-AdsBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c

OAI-AdsBot compared with other OpenAI agents

See all 20 agents side by side in the AI crawler directory.

OAI-AdsBot FAQ

Abd Shanti

Co-founder and strategy lead at Outline Technologies, the team behind FreeGPTSEO and AI Citation Monitor. Abd works on how brands get found and cited by search engines and AI assistants.