Is ChatGPT blocked from your website?

ChatGPT may answer from an older copy, or from other sites that mention you, so a good answer doesn't prove it can read the page today, and a vague one doesn't prove it can't.

What you actually want to know is whether OpenAI's bots get your page when they ask for it. There are three of them, and they do different jobs.

• OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT search uses. Block it and you can't be cited in ChatGPT search answers.
• ChatGPT-User fetches a page live because someone asked ChatGPT about it right now. Block it and that person gets nothing.
• GPTBot collects text for training future models. Plenty of sites block this one on purpose, and that's a fair choice. It doesn't decide whether you show up in today's answers.

The common accident is blocking all three when you meant to block GPTBot. Lots of copied robots.txt block lists and security plugin presets do exactly that.

How common is a block?

In our study of 1,046 sites (2 September 2026), OAI-SearchBot was refused by 17.0% of the sites that served a browser with no trouble, and ChatGPT-User by 16.6%. Those were real refusals at the server, separate from anything robots.txt said. The sample leans toward newer domains, so treat that as an upper range for an established site, but even a fraction of it is a lot of sites quietly missing from ChatGPT.

Check it properly in a minute

Our free check asks for your page as a normal browser and as each AI crawler, including all three OpenAI bots, in the same few seconds. It reads your robots.txt the way each bot does, and it checks whether your text is in the page without JavaScript, since none of these bots run it. Results in about five seconds, no account, and they're private to you.

If it shows a block, the fix is usually one setting: a line in robots.txt, a CDN bot setting, or a firewall rule. Our guide to robots.txt-versus-server blocks walks through where to look.

Related: robots.txt allows it but it's still blocked · Every AI crawler, explained