Technical & Infrastructure

GPTBot

OpenAI's web crawler, used to index site content for ChatGPT's retrieval and training pipelines.

What it means

GPTBot is the user agent string OpenAI's crawler uses when visiting websites. Site owners can block GPTBot in robots.txt if they do not want their content used in OpenAI's systems. For Shopify merchants who want ChatGPT to recommend their products, GPTBot access should be explicitly permitted. OpenAI documents GPTBot's user agent string at openai.com/gptbot.

Why it matters for Shopify

Shopify merchants who inadvertently block GPTBot in robots.txt remove themselves from ChatGPT's retrieval pool entirely — a single config line can cost all ChatGPT citations.

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