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The painted mark for OpenAI
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OpenAI

GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User

The company behind ChatGPT has three visitors. GPTBot collects pages that may be used to train its AI models. OAI-SearchBot indexes pages for ChatGPT's search. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when someone asks ChatGPT about it, so that visit is prompted by a person in a chat.

Worth knowing: OpenAI announced GPTBot in August 2023 along with a way to block it in robots.txt, and within weeks many large news sites had done so.

Why? Writing and pictures are the raw material for training AI models, and AI search and assistants fetch pages to answer people’s questions. The answer is given inside the chat, so the person asking often never comes to the site itself.