ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is the name OpenAI uses when ChatGPT visits a web page because someone asked it to, instead of crawling on its own.
ChatGPT-User is the name OpenAI's software uses when ChatGPT visits a web page on someone's behalf. It fetches a page only when a person, or a custom GPT, asks ChatGPT to do something that needs it.
It shows you the moments when someone in a ChatGPT conversation wanted to look at one of your pages. And it follows different rules from OpenAI's other bots, which matters when you write your robots.txt.
How it's different from OpenAI's other bots
OpenAI runs three bots, each listed on its bots page:
- GPTBot collects pages that may be used to train OpenAI's models
- OAI-SearchBot finds pages so they can appear in ChatGPT's search results
- ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user's request calls for it
On ChatGPT-User, OpenAI says: "Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply." So a robots.txt rule may not keep it out the way it keeps out the other two.
When it shows up
For example, someone pastes a link to Harrow & Pine's dining table page into ChatGPT and asks whether the table will fit a room of three by four metres. ChatGPT-User fetches the page, reads the dimensions and answers. Harrow & Pine's server logs show one visit from ChatGPT-User to that page.
A spike in ChatGPT-User visits to a page means people are bringing it into their conversations. That's a good sign the page matters to buyers, and a good reason to make sure everything on the page can be read without scripts.
In AnswerOrbit
The Audit tab in Website lists each AI bot with its purpose, and marks bots like this one as fetching for a user. Connect your server logs and the Bot visits tab shows which pages it read. We check every request against the addresses OpenAI publishes before we count it. See Website and AI traffic.