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OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's web crawler that indexes pages to power ChatGPT's search and browsing features.
OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot began rendering JavaScript on September 25, 2026, according to IP-verified logs from a Japanese Next.js marketplace. OpenAI has not announced it, so the case rests on prefetch URLs that only a JavaScript run can produce.
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Amazon's robots.txt now disallows ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot, and in ZDNET's tests the shopping agent sent a buyer to Walmart, eBay and a retailer called Soaplicity instead of Amazon listings.
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New disallow rules for ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot went into Amazon's robots.txt without an announcement. Amazon earns roughly $56 billion a year from advertising that bills only while shoppers are on its own pages.
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Profound raised $96 million at a $1 billion valuation in February and Adobe closed on Semrush in April. Both deals assume presence in AI answers can be counted, and when ChatGPT names a brand without a link there is no referrer to count it.
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A 41-day test switched off sitemaps and breadcrumbs so client-side navigation was the only way in, and the crawlers behind ChatGPT and Claude never arrived. Googlebot did, then needed 41 days to notice the fix.
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The managed robots.txt file lists eight crawlers. Three of them are the training half of a pair whose search half is left allowed, and Perplexity is not in the file at all.
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A developer's 34-day Caddy log audit found 40.3 assistant fetches a day against Googlebot's 35.8. None of that traffic appears in Search Console.
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