Glossary
OAI-SearchBot
ChatGPT's search crawler. It surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, and ChatGPT's documentation says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.
OAI-SearchBot is the agent ChatGPT uses to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features. It is the one that matters most for being cited: ChatGPT's documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and it recommends allowing both the user agent in robots.txt and requests from its published IP ranges. It is controlled independently of GPTBot, the training crawler, so a store can allow search while disallowing training. ChatGPT's documentation also notes that a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect for search. ChatGPT-User, the third agent, fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT something that needs it; ChatGPT's documentation says it is not used to decide whether content may appear in search. On Shopify, check both your robots.txt and any bot protection in front of the store, because a CDN rule can refuse the crawler even when robots.txt allows it. For product cards in ChatGPT Shopping, Shopify stores are also represented through Shopify Catalog, which is a separate route from the web crawl. Details are in ChatGPT's crawler documentation, read 23 September 2026.
Citelift is listed on the Shopify App Store: Citelift on the Shopify App Store.