site:openai.com GPTBot OAI SearchBot ChatGPT User robots.txt search inclusion exact quote URL merchants product feeds ChatGPT shopping 2026

OpenAI’s 2026 guidance separates search visibility, model training, user-requested visits, and product-feed indexing. Allowing OAI-SearchBot supports ChatGPT Search inclusion; GPTBot can remain blocked independently.

• Search inclusion — OAI-SearchBot: “A webmaster can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot.”

• Training — GPTBot: GPTBot controls whether content may be crawled for training OpenAI’s generative models; its robots.txt setting is independent of OAI-SearchBot.

• User-requested access — ChatGPT-User: This user agent represents visits initiated by a ChatGPT user rather than automatic search indexing. The crawler documentation is the authoritative reference, but the available search extract did not expose a complete exact quote for this agent.

• Merchant eligibility: “Any website or merchant can appear in ChatGPT search.”

• Product feeds: “To make your products discoverable inside ChatGPT, merchants provide a structured product feed file that OpenAI ingests and indexes.”

• Feed access in 2026: “Onboarding product feeds in ChatGPT is currently available to approved partners.”

• Shopping presentation: For shopping-intent queries, ChatGPT can display product images, details, and purchase links; OpenAI says these organic product results are selected independently and are not ads.

A practical robots.txt configuration is:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

This permits potential ChatGPT Search discovery while opting out of GPTBot training collection, though it does not guarantee ranking or inclusion.