OpenAI's New Web Crawler GPTBot - What You Need to Know
OpenAI's New Web Crawler GPTBot - What You Need to Know
OpenAI, the company behind the viral conversational AI ChatGPT, recently launched a new web crawler named GPTBot. This crawler is being used to improve ChatGPT and other AI models by collecting text data from websites.?
As a website owner, here's what you need to know about GPTBot:
What is GPTBot?
GPTBot is a web crawler created by OpenAI to improve its AI language models like ChatGPT. It can be identified by this user agent string:
User agent token: GPTBo
Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/gptbot)t
OpenAI states that GPTBot crawls web pages that may be used to enhance future AI models. The crawled pages are filtered to remove any that require paywall access, collect personal data, or contain policy-violating text.?
How GPTBot Helps AI Models
By allowing GPTBot to crawl your website, you can contribute to improving the accuracy and capabilities of AI systems like ChatGPT. The text data gathered by GPTBot provides useful training data to enhance these large language models.
Blocking or Allowing GPTBot
You can control GPTBot's access to your website using the standard robots.txt file. To completely block the crawler, add this:
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User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
To allow access to only certain sections, you can do:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /public/
Disallow: /private/?
Adjust the paths as needed for your site structure.
GPTBot Traffic Concerns
Some webmasters have reported excessive requests from GPTBot potentially impacting server resources. Keep an eye on your access logs for any crawler impact. As needed, consider rate limiting or blocked access.
The Future of Web Crawling Bots
As AI technology continues advancing rapidly, we'll likely see more of these specialized web crawling bots from companies like OpenAI. Be on the lookout for new user agents and proactively monitor and control their access as desired.
Conclusion
GPTBot represents an interesting development in leveraging web content to enhance AI models. While allowing access can contribute to AI progress, as a website owner you have full control over what OpenAI's crawler can access through standard robots.txt rules. Consider both the pros and cons for your own site's situation.