OAI-AdsBot
Few readable files block OAI-AdsBot in October 2026, at 20 sites or 0.3%. The community reference lists its operator as OpenAI.
Who runs OAI-AdsBot?
| Fact | OAI-AdsBot reference entry |
|---|---|
| Operator | “OpenAI” |
| Purpose | “Validates and targets ads on ChatGPT.” |
| Does OAI-AdsBot obey robots.txt? | “Unclear at this time.” |
| Frequency | “Only when a page is submitted as an ad.” |
| Cloudflare managed list for OAI-AdsBot | No |
These facts quote the stored community ai.robots.txt reference.
“OAI-AdsBot visits the landing page of a page submitted as an ad on ChatGPT, to check it against OpenAI's policies and, per OpenAI, to "determine when it's most relevant to show the ad to users". OpenAI states it only visits pages submitted as ads and that the data is not used to train foundation models. Documented at https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots”
This entry’s stated use is quoted above. An owner may want a page included in search and available on request without offering its contents for future model development.
How many sites block it?
Within 6,171 readable robots.txt files, the name appears in 36, or 0.6%. Instructions blocking every path, Disallow: /, appear in 20, a 0.3% share. No whole-site ban is recorded for 6,151 files.
From the highest 1,000 ranks, 552 files could be read. Its naming count is 4, or 0.7%, and the block count is 1. The leading sites have a lower block share, 0.2%. Compare 19 blocks among the 5,619 readable files below those ranks, or 0.3%.
| Readable files | Named by | Named share | Blocked by | Blocked share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OAI-AdsBot, all ranks | 36 | 0.6% | 20 | 0.3% |
| OAI-AdsBot, top 1,000 | 4 | 0.7% | 1 | 0.2% |
| OAI-AdsBot, remaining ranks | 32 | 0.6% | 19 | 0.3% |
Here, the total counts whole-site blocks recorded for this crawler. It leaves out general User-agent: * instructions. Of 20 blocks, 12 do not also appear in our count of files naming it. The overlap between naming and blocking is 8 files. Naming without a whole-site ban accounts for 28, and 6,135 files never name it. We ignore capitalization and repeated names.
How to block or allow it
Use your site’s root file, robots.txt. Specific groups for OAI-AdsBot take precedence over User-agent: *, according to the robots.txt standard.
Block the whole site
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Disallow: /Allow access
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /It's the 133rd most-named crawler of the 171 we counted in the crawler index.
Which other crawlers does this operator run?
How we counted
For OAI-AdsBot, on 19 October 2026, we requested robots.txt from Tranco’s top 10,000 sites. Each file had 8 seconds to arrive, up to 262,144 bytes. Missing, unreachable and oversized files do not contribute to these shares. Parsing includes files read again, through scripts/robots_2026_08_06.py (robots.py at app commit 07104ff). See the full survey method.
Common questions
What does naming this crawler tell me?
The 36 files naming it include 28 files without a whole-site ban.
Are leading sites different?
Within readable robots.txt files near the top of the ranking, 0.7% name it and 0.2% block it. Overall, naming reaches 0.6% and blocking 0.3%.
How does the nearby crawler compare?
BuddyBot is named by 35 files and blocked by 43, or 0.7%. For this crawler, 36 files name it and 20 block it, a 0.3% share.