Agent-Readiness Grade / Crawlers / ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User
OpenAI · user-triggered fetch. Source: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots, read 2026-09-29. Where the vendor page does not state a fact, this page says "not published".
Facts from the vendor page
| Operator | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| What it is for | User-triggered fetch. OpenAI uses it when a ChatGPT user or a Custom GPT asks a question and the model visits a web page, and for GPT Actions. OpenAI states it is not used to crawl the web automatically and is not used to decide whether content appears in search. |
| Published user-agent string | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/botFull string as published by the vendor. |
| Honors robots.txt | May not apply. OpenAI says that because these fetches are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply; search opt-outs belong on the OAI-SearchBot token instead. |
| Verification (IP ranges or reverse DNS) | Published IP ranges at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. |
| robots.txt token | ChatGPT-User |
robots.txt lines
To allow ChatGPT-User explicitly (so your policy survives a change to the User-agent: * group):
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Allow: /
To block it:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: /
OpenAI documents ChatGPT-User as a user-triggered fetch and says robots.txt rules may not apply to it; treat these lines as a preference, not a guarantee.
What Agent-Readiness Grade checks for ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is not one of the 8 tokens in the crawler-access score, because the vendor documents it as a user-triggered fetch rather than an automatic crawl and says robots.txt may not apply to it. What a ChatGPT-User fetch sees is what the readability area measures: the raw HTML of your home page without JavaScript, plus the structured-data area's JSON-LD and Open Graph checks.
Context: in the 30-day census of one Cloudflare zone (2026-08-29 to 2026-09-28), 1,000 requests carried a user agent matching "ChatGPT-User"; most of them probed scanner paths such as /.env, and only 36 reached a real page. See the census report.
Other crawlers
GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ClaudeBot · Claude-User · PerplexityBot · Google-Extended · Amazonbot · CCBot · Bytespider
Free agent-readiness checkers are a crowded category: Goodie, Frase, aiwebreadiness.com, Arobis, Rank Prompt, Otterly and Writesonic each offer one. Of the checkers we looked at, Agent-Readiness Grade is the only one we found that grades payment and agent-checkout surfaces (/.well-known/x402, agent-card.json, mcp-registry-auth, openapi.json, the MCP endpoint) and legal notices. Statement dated 2026-09-29.