Bytespider vs GPTBot
In the census run that finished 2026-10-24, robots.txt closed the homepage to Bytespider on 659 of the 4,501 top sites that serve a robots.txt (14.6%), and to GPTBot on 644 (14.3%).
| Bytespider | GPTBot | |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | ByteDance | OpenAI |
| What it is | training crawler | training crawler |
| What it does | ByteDance | OpenAI training + index |
| How a request can be verified | Its operator publishes no IP ranges or DNS names for it, so a request carrying this name cannot be verified. Treat the name in a log line as a claim. | Its operator publishes the IP ranges it crawls from (https://openai.com/gptbot.json), so a request carrying the name can be checked against that list. |
| robots.txt closes the homepage (of sites with a robots.txt) | 659 (14.6%) | 644 (14.3%) |
| Refused at the door (of sites that answered a browser) | not requested as this identity | 1,108 (20.0%) |
Top 10,000 sites, census of 2026-10-24. “Refused at the door” is a non-2xx answer to a client declaring that name, from CrawlCheck’s own addresses, where the browser got 2xx. Every crawler on the radar.
Let Bytespider in and keep GPTBot out
User-agent: Bytespider
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /A crawler obeys only the most specific group that names it and ignores * entirely. If your User-agent: * group has Disallow rules, repeat them under Bytespider, or naming it drops them. Swap the two names to do the reverse.
Check what your own site tells both: scan it free. Catalogue data CC BY 4.0 at /ai-crawlers.json.