How is this different from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics shows you traffic. Shadow shows you traffic, AI bot activity, what AI platforms say about your brand, AND tells you what to do about all of it. It's analytics + AI intelligence + action steps in one tool.

Do I need to install anything?

For basic monitoring (bot detection, AI perception, readiness score) — nope, just enter your URL. For full visitor analytics (clicks, behavior, sessions), add one script tag. One-click integrations for Vercel, Shopify, WordPress, and more.

Will it slow down my site?

No. The script is under 5KB and loads async. Zero impact on page speed or Core Web Vitals. External monitoring has literally no impact — it watches from the outside.

What AI bots does Shadow detect?

All of them. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider, Amazonbot, and dozens more. The Shadow Network means new bots get identified across all users instantly.

What do you mean by "actionable steps"?

Shadow doesn't just show you graphs. It says things like: "ChatGPT has your pricing wrong — add structured data to /pricing to fix it" or "Your bounce rate on /features is 68% — here's why and what to change." Specific, do-it-today recommendations.

Can Shadow block bots?

Shadow is a telescope, not a shield. It shows you who's visiting and what AI says about you. It generates block rules and robots.txt configs you can apply — but it doesn't intercept traffic.

Yes. Shadow never collects PII. IP addresses are hashed after classification. No cookies on your visitors. All Shadow Network data is anonymized. GDPR compliant by design.

What is ChatGPT-User?

ChatGPT-User is the user agent OpenAI uses when a ChatGPT subscriber asks ChatGPT to browse or summarize a specific URL in real-time. It is not a crawler — it only fetches a URL when a human user explicitly requests it. Unlike GPTBot (which crawls autonomously for training) or OAI-SearchBot (which crawls for search indexing), ChatGPT-User is reactive: it only activates on demand.

Does blocking ChatGPT-User stop AI training on my content?

No. ChatGPT-User and GPTBot are completely separate. GPTBot is OpenAI's autonomous training crawler. Blocking ChatGPT-User only prevents ChatGPT from fetching your pages on-demand when users request it. To stop training data collection, you need to block GPTBot separately.

Does blocking ChatGPT-User remove my site from ChatGPT Search?

No. ChatGPT Search is powered by OAI-SearchBot, which is a separate crawler. Blocking ChatGPT-User only affects real-time, on-demand URL fetching by ChatGPT users — it has no effect on ChatGPT's search index.

Does OpenAI respect robots.txt for ChatGPT-User?

Yes. OpenAI has publicly documented that ChatGPT-User respects robots.txt Disallow directives. A standard robots.txt block is sufficient to prevent ChatGPT from browsing your site on-demand.

Who typically needs to block ChatGPT-User?

Blocking ChatGPT-User matters most for: paywalled publishers (ChatGPT can summarize premium content a user shares the URL of), legal or compliance-sensitive sites (regulated content that shouldn't be processed by external AI), and sites where the content is a competitive moat. For most public websites, blocking ChatGPT-User is low priority — it only fires on user-initiated requests, not autonomous crawling.

If a ChatGPT user pastes my URL into ChatGPT, will my robots.txt block stop it?

Yes, if you have Disallow: / under User-agent: ChatGPT-User in your robots.txt. OpenAI's ChatGPT-User agent checks robots.txt before fetching content. If your path is disallowed, ChatGPT will not read the page and will tell the user it cannot access the content.

What is the difference between ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, and OAI-SearchBot?

OpenAI operates three distinct agents: GPTBot crawls the web autonomously to collect training data for AI models. OAI-SearchBot crawls the web autonomously to build and maintain ChatGPT's search index. ChatGPT-User is not a crawler — it fetches specific URLs in real-time only when a ChatGPT user explicitly requests it. Each can be blocked independently in robots.txt.

OpenAIRespects robots.txtReal-Time Browsing

How to Block ChatGPT-User: Stop ChatGPT Real-Time Browsing on Your Site

ChatGPT-User isn't a crawler — it's triggered only when a ChatGPT user explicitly asks it to read a URL. Blocking it stops on-demand page reads. It has zero effect on training data or ChatGPT Search.

Updated March 2026

ChatGPT-User ≠ GPTBot ≠ OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI operates three distinct agents. Most people conflate them. They have completely different purposes and blocking one has zero effect on the others.

GPTBotAutonomous training crawler. Crawls the web to collect data for future GPT models.

OAI-SearchBotSearch index crawler. Builds and maintains ChatGPT Search (SearchGPT) results.

ChatGPT-UserOn-demand browsing agent. Fetches a specific URL only when a ChatGPT user explicitly requests it.

What Does ChatGPT-User Actually Do?

When a ChatGPT subscriber types something like "summarize this article for me" and pastes a URL, ChatGPT sends a live HTTP request to that URL using the ChatGPT-User user agent. It reads the page, processes the content, and returns a summary to the user.

This is fundamentally different from a crawler. It doesn't systematically index your site. It doesn't follow links. It fetches exactly the URL the user provided — once, on demand. Volume is typically low unless your content gets widely shared in ChatGPT conversations.

The user agent string is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

How to Block ChatGPT-User in robots.txt

Add this to your robots.txt to block ChatGPT from reading any page on your site on-demand:

robots.txtBlock ChatGPT-User only

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

To block all three OpenAI agents at once (training + search + browsing):

robots.txtBlock all OpenAI agents

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Note: Each agent needs its own block

You cannot group them under a single User-agent: directive. Each must be listed separately. Blocking GPTBot does not block ChatGPT-User or OAI-SearchBot.

Who Actually Needs to Block ChatGPT-User?

For most public websites, blocking ChatGPT-User is low priority. It only fires when a user explicitly submits your URL — not on autonomous crawls. But there are specific cases where it matters:

🔒

Paywalled content publishers

ChatGPT can summarize premium articles a user shares the URL of, even if the user can't read them without a subscription. Blocking ChatGPT-User prevents this bypass.

⚖️

Legal or compliance-sensitive sites

Medical, legal, financial, or regulated content that shouldn't be processed by external AI systems without explicit consent. Blocking adds a clear technical boundary.

🛡️

Competitive intelligence protection

Pricing pages, proprietary research, or product roadmaps you don't want competitors to query via AI. Block if your content is a competitive moat.

What Blocking ChatGPT-User Does (and Doesn't) Do

✓ What it stops

• ChatGPT fetching your pages when users submit URLs
• ChatGPT summarizing your paywalled content via on-demand reads
• Real-time page reads triggered by ChatGPT Plus/Pro users

✗ What it doesn't stop

• GPTBot training crawls (block GPTBot separately)
• OAI-SearchBot search indexing (block separately)
• ChatGPT's existing knowledge of your content
• Users copy-pasting your content into ChatGPT manually

Verify Your Block Is Working

After deploying your robots.txt changes, test them at Open Shadow's robots.txt checker. Enter your domain and verify ChatGPT-User shows as blocked.

You can also check your server logs. ChatGPT-User requests will appear with the user agent string containing ChatGPT-User/1.0. After blocking, you should see 403 or no requests from that agent (depending on how your server handles disallowed bots).

nginx log grep

grep "ChatGPT-User" /var/log/nginx/access.log

Frequently Asked Questions

If I block ChatGPT-User, will ChatGPT tell users it can't access my site?

Yes. When ChatGPT-User encounters a Disallow in robots.txt, ChatGPT informs the user that it cannot access the content at that URL. The user will see a message like "I'm unable to access this page" — rather than silently failing.

Does blocking ChatGPT-User affect my site's ranking in ChatGPT Search?

No. ChatGPT Search uses OAI-SearchBot, a separate crawler. Blocking ChatGPT-User has zero effect on whether your content appears in ChatGPT Search results.

Can I block ChatGPT-User for specific paths only?

Yes. Instead of Disallow: / you can target specific paths: Disallow: /members/ or Disallow: /premium/ — this lets public pages remain accessible while protecting gated content.

Is there a way to block ChatGPT-User at the server level instead of robots.txt?

Yes — you can match the user agent in nginx or Cloudflare and return a 403. But robots.txt is sufficient since OpenAI respects it. Server-level blocking is only worth adding if you want to also prevent the request from hitting your origin at all (reducing load).

Related Guides

How to Block GPTBot

OpenAI's training crawler — different from ChatGPT-User

How to Block OAI-SearchBot

OpenAI's third crawler for SearchGPT

How to Block PerplexityBot

Another AI search that browses live pages

robots.txt for AI Bots (Complete Guide)

51+ crawlers, full reference table

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