ChatGPT
Operated by OpenAI
ChatGPT-UserAbout this crawler
ChatGPT is OpenAI's ai answers crawler. Fetches the page while a person is waiting for an answer in a chat assistant. The visit is driven by a live question, so the page can be quoted back to that person within seconds.
A request from ChatGPT usually means someone asked a question and the page was fetched to help answer it, so a real person may be reading a summary of it right now.
User agent
Match on the token, not the whole header. Operators change version numbers and the surrounding text freely, so a substring match on the token is the only stable rule.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots)
Typical shape. The exact header varies by operator and version.
Blocking it in robots.txt
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /
robots.txt is a request, not enforcement. Well behaved crawlers honour it; nothing stops one that does not.
Verifying a request really came from ChatGPT
Scrapers routinely borrow a well known crawler's user agent to slip past rate limits. Checking takes three pieces.
1. User agent
What the request claims to be. It is a plain header that anyone can set, so on its own it proves nothing.
2. Request IP
The address the request actually arrived from. Your server sees it directly, and it cannot be set by the caller the way a header can.
3. Range check
The operator publishes the IP ranges this crawler uses, as a file anyone can fetch. A request is genuine only if the address it came from falls inside one of those ranges.
Zenovay refreshes the list from the operator's own file and checks each request against it.
Sample published ranges
A sample, not the full list. The operator's file is the authority and it changes.
Published range file: https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
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