{"id":77458,"date":"2025-12-28T04:53:50","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T04:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/primer-on-chatgpts-3-bots\/"},"modified":"2025-12-28T04:53:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T04:53:51","slug":"primer-on-chatgpts-3-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/primer-on-chatgpts-3-bots\/","title":{"rendered":"Primer on ChatGPT&#8217;s 3 Bots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>ChatGPT uses separate bots for training, searching, and taking action:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>GPTBot<\/em> provides training data.<\/li>\n<li><em>OAI-SearchBot<\/em> gathers data to respond to specific prompts.<\/li>\n<li><em>ChatGPT-User<\/em> accesses pages when requested by users.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Knowing <a href=\"https:\/\/platform.openai.com\/docs\/bots\" data-wpel-link=\"external\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"external noopener noreferrer\">which bot<\/a> is responsible for which task is essential before attempting to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/seo-manage-crawling-indexing-with-robots-exclusion-protocol\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">disallow it<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3><em>GPTBot<\/em><\/h3>\n<p><em>GPTBot<\/em> locates information to build and update training data, ChatGPT\u2019s knowledge base for providing answers.<\/p>\n<p>ChatGPT doesn\u2019t store training URLs or track where the info comes from. Disallowing this bot will prevent the platform from using your content for training, but it won\u2019t impact your traffic. It may affect what ChatGPT understands about your company, though external sources likely provide that information, too.<\/p>\n<p>Some publishers disallow the bot to prevent ChatGPT from learning from their content and to reduce costs, as AI bots can increase hosting needs and slow down servers, especially for large sites.<\/p>\n<p>I typically suggest allowing access to <em>GPTBot<\/em> to provide first-hand information about a business and thus control the context.<\/p>\n<p>ChatGPT updates training data regularly, usually with <a href=\"https:\/\/help.openai.com\/en\/articles\/6825453-chatgpt-release-notes\" data-wpel-link=\"external\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"external noopener noreferrer\">each release<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3><em>OAI-SearchBot<\/em><\/h3>\n<p><em>OAI-SearchBot<\/em> searches the web for current information, user reviews, product details, and more.<\/p>\n<p>Opinions differ as to whether the platform indexes the URLs from these searches. (ChatGPT states it \u201cuses a hybrid system that includes limited indexing, plus on-demand retrieval, rather than a single, exhaustive web index.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p><em>OAI-SearchBot<\/em> searches <a href=\"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/regex-in-gsc-reveals-chatgpt-searches\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google<\/a>, Bing, Reddit, and others for info, much like humans, and may independently crawl sites, too.<\/p>\n<p>Disallowing this bot prevents it from visiting your site, but it may still cite your pages via external links. Google does this, too, incidentally. A robots.txt file can prevent Google\u2019s bot from crawling a site, but the search giant can still index and rank its pages.<\/p>\n<p>Still, disallowing <em>OAI-SearchBot<\/em> will likely reduce or eliminate\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/tools-to-track-genai-citations-sources\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">citations<\/a>\u00a0(and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/how-to-track-chatgpt-traffic-in-ga4\" data-wpel-link=\"internal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">traffic<\/a>), which is why I don\u2019t usually advise it.<\/p>\n<h3><em>ChatGPT-User<\/em><\/h3>\n<p><em>ChatGPT-User<\/em> performs actions as requested by users. For example, a user can prompt ChatGPT to visit a page and summarize its content.<\/p>\n<p><em>ChatGPT-User<\/em> does not provide training data or citations. If your server logs include this bot, a human instructed ChatGPT to visit your site. There\u2019s no way to block this bot because it\u2019s user-initiated, per ChatGPT.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"pld-like-dislike-wrap pld-template-2\">\r\n    <div class=\"pld-like-wrap  pld-common-wrap\">\r\n    <a href=\"javascript:void(0)\" class=\"pld-like-trigger pld-like-dislike-trigger  \" title=\"\" data-post-id=\"77458\" data-trigger-type=\"like\" data-restriction=\"no\" data-already-liked=\"0\">\r\n                        <i class=\"fas fa-heart\"><\/i>\r\n                <\/a>\r\n    <span class=\"pld-like-count-wrap pld-count-wrap\">    <\/span>\r\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ChatGPT uses separate bots for training, searching, and taking action: GPTBot provides training data. OAI-SearchBot&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":77459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Primer-on-ChatGPTs-3-Bots.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77460,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77458\/revisions\/77460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dralysstore.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}