OpenAI’s GPTBot is hungry for text data: Here’s how to stop it from eating your site

OpenAI’s GPTBot is a powerful web crawler that is designed to crawl the public internet and collect text data for use in training AI models. While this can be beneficial for AI development, it can also pose a threat to the privacy and security of websites.

In a recent blog post, OpenAI acknowledged that it uses GPTBot to scrape text data from websites. The company claims that it only scrapes text that is publicly available and that it does not collect any personally identifiable information. 

However, some privacy experts have raised concerns about the potential for GPTBot to be used to collect sensitive data from websites.

If you’re concerned about GPTBot crawling your site, you can take steps to stop it. In this article, we’ll show you how to spot GPTBot and how to block it from your site.

Here’s what you need to know

• GPTBot has the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot/).
• You can also check the IP address of the crawler. OpenAI has provided a list of IP addresses that GPTBot uses. You can find this list on the OpenAI website.
• You can stop GPTBot from crawling your site by adding an entry to your robots.txt file.
• You can also use a web application firewall (WAF) to block GPTBot.

What is GPTBot?

Image Credit- https://procoders.tech/blog/what-is-gpt-3-chatbot/

GPTBot is a web crawler developed by OpenAI. OpenAI has provided a list of IP addresses that GPTBot uses. You can find this list on the OpenAI website.

It is designed to follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol. However, not all crawlers do. If you are concerned about GPTBot crawling your site, you can also use a web application firewall (WAF) to block it. 

A WAF can be configured to block traffic from specific IP addresses or user agents.

How to Spot OpenAI’s Crawler Bot?

OpenAI’s crawler bot, GPTBot, is easy to spot. It has the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot/)

You can also check the IP address of the crawler. OpenAI has provided a list of IP addresses that GPTBot uses. You can find this list on the OpenAI website.

Here are the steps on how to spot OpenAI’s crawler bot:

1. Go to your website’s logs and look for requests from the IP addresses listed on the OpenAI website.
2. Check the user agent string of the requests. If it is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot/), then you have confirmed that GPTBot is crawling your site.

If you have confirmed that GPTBot is crawling your site, you can take steps to block it. You can either add an entry to your robots.txt file or use a web application firewall (WAF).

How to Stop GPTBot from Crawling Your Site?

Use robots.txt

• You can add an entry to your robots.txt file to tell GPTBot not to crawl your site.
• The following entry will tell GPTBot to stay out of your entire site:

1. User-agent: GPTBot
2. Disallow: /

• You can also use more specific rules to allow GPTBot to crawl only certain parts of your site. For example, the following entry will allow GPTBot to crawl your blog posts, but not your other pages:
• User-agent: GPTBot
• Allow: /blog/

Use a web application firewall (WAF)

• A WAF can be configured to block traffic from specific IP addresses or user agents.
• This can be a more effective way to block GPTBot, as it will not be able to bypass your robots.txt file.

Conclusion

The decision of whether or not to allow GPTBot to crawl your site is up to you. If you are concerned about your privacy or the security of your content, you may want to block GPTBot.

However, if you are willing to share your data with OpenAI in order to help improve its AI models, you may want to allow GPTBot to crawl your site.