ChatGPT-User

What ChatGPT-User does

ChatGPT-User is not a crawler. It fetches specific URLs in direct response to what a person asks ChatGPT to do - summarize this page, check this source, use this tool. OpenAI documents it separately from GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, publishes its IP ranges for verification, and says the fetched content is not used for training. Its request pattern in a log is distinctive: single pages, no systematic archive walking, timing that follows human attention rather than a schedule.

Why it visits your site

Each hit is roughly one human actively engaging with your specific page through ChatGPT - closer to a visit than a crawl. Watching which pages attract it tells you what people ask AI about your site.

The bigger picture: AI user agents

User-agent fetchers are not crawlers in any meaningful sense: each request happens because a specific person asked an assistant about a specific page, right now. The pattern in your logs is the opposite of a crawl - single pages, irregular timing, no systematic walk of your archive. It is closer to a human visit with an unusual browser than to bot traffic, and treating its volume as an engagement signal - which of your pages do people ask AI about? - is more useful than treating it as load.

This category is also where the robots.txt social contract gets genuinely contested. Some operators apply robots rules to these fetches anyway; at least one documents that it does not, on the argument that an agent acting on a user's explicit request is the user's browser, not a robot. Wherever that debate settles, the practical takeaway for site owners is that policy files govern this category unevenly, and server-side visibility is how you know what is actually happening.

Should you block it?

Blocking it makes your pages unreadable to ChatGPT users in the moment they ask about you, which is usually the opposite of what a marketer wants - the person is already interested; the fetch is your chance to be represented accurately. Most sites should allow it and treat its volume as an engagement signal.

Block via robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask ChatGPT-User to stay away:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.

How to see ChatGPT-User traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every ChatGPT-User request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because ChatGPT-User doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to ChatGPT-User and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.