Websites blocking GPTBot

OpenAI's web crawler for collecting training data for its foundation models, including the GPT series. Announced in August 2023, it quickly became the most widely blocked AI crawler token.

Operated by OpenAI · Training crawler · operator documentation

9.99% block GPTBot 2.49 million of 24.91 million domains with a known robots.txt policy 6.66% block it by name 1.66 million domains, the rest inherit a blanket * block 2.77% restrict it by name 690K domains name it and close some of its paths 10.23% name it in robots.txt 2.55 million domains give it rules of their own

Data for Aug 2026. All four percentages divide by the same 24.91 million domains. Blocked counts both explicit User-agent: GPTBot blocks and blanket * blocks the crawler inherits.

Historical mentions, HTTP Archive

Share of sites in each month's HTTP Archive crawl whose robots.txt named GPTBot. This series counts mentions only (the archive keeps no rule text), comes from a different population than our own crawl above, and the two are never merged.

High-authority sites blocking GPTBot by name

Domain OPROpen Page Rank Blocking since
linkedin.com 9.82/10 Aug 2026
fbcdn.net 9.40/10 Aug 2026
nytimes.com 9.28/10 Aug 2026
bbc.co.uk 9.18/10 Aug 2026
wiley.com 9.14/10 Aug 2026
cookielaw.org 9.10/10 Aug 2026
sagepub.com 9.07/10 Aug 2026
bandcamp.com 9.06/10 Aug 2026
tripadvisor.com 9.05/10 Aug 2026
tandfonline.com 9.05/10 Aug 2026
lnkd.in 9.05/10 Aug 2026
congress.gov 9.05/10 Aug 2026
bizjournals.com 9.04/10 Aug 2026
msn.com 9.04/10 Aug 2026
mayoclinic.org 9.04/10 Aug 2026
abc.net.au 9.04/10 Aug 2026
pexels.com 9.03/10 Aug 2026
cbsnews.com 9.02/10 Aug 2026
hugedomains.com 9.00/10 Aug 2026
uk.com 9.00/10 Aug 2026
patreon.com 8.99/10 Aug 2026
media-amazon.com 8.95/10 Aug 2026
ebay.com 8.95/10 Aug 2026
science.org 8.95/10 Aug 2026
lefigaro.fr 8.95/10 Aug 2026
usgs.gov 8.95/10 Aug 2026
meetup.com 8.94/10 Aug 2026
mastodon.social 8.93/10 Aug 2026
quora.com 8.92/10 Aug 2026
autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl 8.92/10 Aug 2026

Sites whose robots.txt names GPTBot (or a legacy alias) with a full block, ranked by Open Page Rank. Sites blocking every crawler with a blanket * rule are counted above but not listed here. Since dates start at our first observation of the rule.

Restricting some paths

Crawler first seen in the wild around Aug 2023. How to block it and what each state means is on the methodology page.

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