OpenAI’s public crawler documentation now lists OAI-AdsBot, a bot that can visit pages submitted as ChatGPT ads to check policy compliance and help determine ad relevance.
The entry can be found alongside OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and ChatGPT-User on OpenAI. crawler documentation pagewhich brings the number of documented robots to four.
OpenAI states that OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads and that the data it collects is not used to train its core generative AI models.
What the robot does
By OpenAI DocumentationOAI-AdsBot may visit the landing page of an ad after submitting the ad. The bot checks if the page complies with OpenAI’s advertising policies. It can also use landing page content to decide when to show the ad to ChatGPT users.
The bot identifies itself with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot.
Both OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot are version 1.3, according to OpenAI documentation. The crawler only visits pages submitted as advertising landing pages, not the wider web.
What the robot doesn’t do
The data collected by OAI-AdsBot is not used to train basic generative AI models. This keeps OAI-AdsBot out of GPTBot territory, which handles the collection of training data.
It also helps separate OAI-AdsBot from other OpenAI robots. OAI-SearchBot surfaces content in ChatGPT search, while ChatGPT-User retrieves pages during user-initiated browsing, and OAI-AdsBot is limited to ad validation.
OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot can be controlled independently via robots.txt. ChatGPT-User is user-initiated and the company notes that robots.txt rules may not apply to it. The OAI-AdsBot entry does not indicate how the bot processes the robots.txt file.
No list of public IP addresses yet
OpenAI publishes IP range files for its previous three robots on openai.com/searchbot.json, openai.com/gptbot.jsonAnd openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. At the time of publication, no equivalent openai.com/adsbot.json the file appears in the OpenAI documentation.
Without a published listing, verifying a genuine OAI-AdsBot visit becomes more difficult. User agent strings can be spoofed and IP lists allow you to check the other three OpenAI bots. For OAI-AdsBot, this cross-check is not available.
Why it matters
OAI-AdsBot has two audiences. Advertisers who purchase placements on ChatGPT need the bot to access their landing pages; otherwise, the ad may not be validated. Anyone tracking AI bot activity in server logs is assigned a new user agent to monitor, tied to paid inventory rather than research or training.
Aggressive bot protection through Cloudflare, Akamai, or similar tools can block OAI-AdsBot before it reaches the page. This could create validation friction for advertisers who use strict bot mitigation tools.
Looking to the future
ChatGPT’s advertising program has evolved rapidly since OpenAI started testing ads on February 9. As access opens up to more advertisers, OAI-AdsBot traffic will begin to appear in more server logs. Watch for a possible IP range file on openai.com/adsbot.json if OpenAI chooses to release one. For now you need to work with the user-agent chain.
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