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ChatGPT-User

ChatGPT-User is OpenAI's on-demand, user-triggered web crawler — documented alongside other OpenAI crawlers. Positive-control counterpart to Perplexity in Cloudflare's 2025-08-04 post: when Cloudflare ran the same controlled experiment against ChatGPT that caught Perplexity's stealth crawling, ChatGPT-User:

1. Fetched robots.txt first.
2. Honored the Disallow and stopped crawling.
3. When the Disallow was removed but a block page was returned, still stopped.
4. No follow-up crawl attempts from alternate user-agents or third-party bots.

This four-step behavior is what Cloudflare argues a cooperative AI crawler should look like. Combined with ChatGPT Agent signing its requests via Web Bot Auth — see systems/web-bot-auth / patterns/signed-bot-request — the OpenAI crawler posture is the reference against which the 2025-08-04 post measures Perplexity.

Seen in

• sources/2025-08-04-cloudflare-perplexity-stealth-undeclared-crawlers — canonical wiki instance; the only bot in the post that passes all four etiquette checks.

Related

• systems/web-bot-auth — ChatGPT Agent signs via Web Bot Auth; cooperative-identity sibling.
• systems/perplexity-ai — negative-control counterpart.
• concepts/declared-crawler / concepts/robots-txt-compliance.
• patterns/signed-bot-request.