How this works
Which one your site lets in decides whether your business can show up when someone asks ChatGPT a question.
The one that matters most for visibility is OAI-SearchBot. It's what surfaces websites in ChatGPT's answers. If you block it, your pages won't appear there.
- OAI-SearchBot: makes your site available in ChatGPT's search answers. This is the one to allow.
- GPTBot: collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Separate setting, separate decision.
- ChatGPT-User: visits a single page when a user asks ChatGPT to look at it. Because a person asked for it, OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply.
These are independent. Blocking GPTBot to keep your content out of training does not remove you from ChatGPT's answers, as long as OAI-SearchBot is still allowed. Many site owners block all of them at once without meaning to.
Why it matters
If OAI-SearchBot can't reach you, ChatGPT answers questions about your industry using someone else's pages. You get no error and no notification. The visits simply never happen.
How to fix
1. Check your robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in your browser. If you see a group like this, your site is blocked:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /Delete those lines. Nothing needs to go in their place. With no rule against it, the crawler is allowed. OpenAI notes that search changes can take about 24 hours to take effect.
2. Check bot protection on your CDN or hosting. If robots.txt is clean and ChatGPT still can't get in, something is refusing the crawler at the server level. On Cloudflare that's usually the Block AI Bots setting or a firewall rule.
Where to change this on your platform
WordPress
robots.txt is normally managed by your SEO plugin: editing robots.txt in Yoast SEO.
Shopify
the file comes from a theme template: editing robots.txt.liquid.
Wix
there's a built-in editor: editing your site's robots.txt file.
Squarespace
you can't edit the file by hand. One checkbox writes it for you: Request that AI models exclude your site, under Settings → Crawlers. Worth knowing: that checkbox blocks GPTBot but not OAI-SearchBot, so ticking it keeps you out of training without removing you from ChatGPT's answers.
If you can't find the setting
Some hosted platforms don't let you change this at all. If robots.txt looks right and your security settings are off, ask your hosting provider whether they filter crawler traffic. That's the one place a site owner can't see from the outside.
