With all the talk about ChatGPT and other AI bots, did you know that there is an OpenAI ChatGPT bot and it respects the robots.txt protocol? So if you want, you can block OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot from crawling, indexing and using your content and data from your website. This will block the ChatGPT plugins specifically.
Mike King spotted this and posted about it on Twitter, you can see the official documentation over here. It reads:
ChatGPT-User is used by plugins in ChatGPT. This user-agent will only be used to take direct actions on behalf of ChatGPT users and is not used for crawling the web in any automatic fashion.
User agent token: ChatGPT-User
Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot
To allow plugins to access your site you can explicitly add the ChatGPT-User to your site’s robots.txt:
Here is a screenshot of the document, in case it changes in the future:
Again, if you don’t want OpenAI to use your site’s data for its AI and ChatGPT, you can disallow it in your robots.txt file. Although, I am not sure how real-time this is and if once OpenAI consumed the content, will it then remove it after-the-fact?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
