Is GPTBot Scraping My Website? How to Check

If your site has slowed down or you are just wondering whether AI is copying your content, you are not imagining it. OpenAI's GPTBot and crawlers like it visit millions of sites to gather training data. Here is how to find out if yours is one of them — in about a minute.

What is GPTBot?

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler. It reads public pages and uses them to help train OpenAI's models. It announces itself with the user-agent GPTBot, so it is detectable — if you know where to look.

Three ways to check if GPTBot is on your site

1. Your server logs. Search your access logs for the word “GPTBot.” Each hit is a visit.
2. A free scanner. The easiest route: paste your URL into the free StopBotAPI scanner and it lists every AI crawler that has reached your site, GPTBot included.
3. Your robots.txt. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt — if there is no rule for GPTBot, nothing is even asking it to stay away.

Should you block it?

That is your call. If you would rather your product photos and writing not be fed into a training set, blocking GPTBot makes sense. Importantly, it will not hurt your Google or Bing ranking — those are different crawlers, and a good setup keeps them fully welcome while turning the scrapers away.