Why it matters to a buyer
Because GPTBot feeds model training rather than live ChatGPT search citations, blocking it is a decision about whether a site's content should help improve future OpenAI models, not a decision about whether the site can be cited by ChatGPT today, and confusing the two leads to sites blocking the wrong bot for the outcome they actually want. A buyer should decide separately, and deliberately, on GPTBot and on OAI-SearchBot rather than treating "OpenAI" as one single crawler to allow or block.
How it is measured or applied
GPTBot is named explicitly in robots.txt with its own user-agent line, allowed or disallowed independently of OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, OpenAI's separate crawlers for search indexing and live user-triggered fetches. OpenAI documents the bot's published IP ranges for firewalls or CDNs that need to verify a request genuinely came from GPTBot rather than a spoofed user agent. Access is confirmed by checking robots.txt directly and by reviewing server logs for GPTBot requests and the response codes they received, since a firewall can silently block the bot even when robots.txt allows it.
