GPTBot

GPTBot is the bot most often blocked in anger, and the block is frequently a mistake in slow motion. Disallowing it keeps your future content out of OpenAI's training data, a legitimate choice for a publisher protecting its archive, but for a business that wants AI engines to know it exists, training data is the long game: what GPTBot reads today shapes what future models say by default. Blocking it also does nothing to remove you from ChatGPT's live search answers, which flow through OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User instead; plenty of sites block GPTBot for policy reasons while staying fully visible in search. Check your robots.txt now: some CMS plugins and CDN bot-protection rules block GPTBot silently. OpenAI publishes its IP ranges, so genuine GPTBot traffic can be verified in your logs.