OAI-AdsBot: make sure ChatGPT can review your ad landing page

OpenAI checks every ChatGPT ad landing page with its own crawler, OAI-AdsBot. If robots.txt, a firewall, a rate limit, a CAPTCHA or a broken link stops it, the ad cannot be reviewed, and OpenAI’s guidance says support cannot bypass the check for you. The fix is usually a few settings, made before you submit.

You can check a landing page for free with our ChatGPT Ads readiness mode, or work through the checklist below.

What OAI-AdsBot does

OAI-AdsBot visits a landing page after you submit an ad, to check that the page is safe and follows OpenAI’s ad policies. OpenAI may also use the page’s content to decide when the ad is relevant to show. It only visits pages submitted as ads and does not crawl the rest of your site, and OpenAI says its data is not used to train models.

It identifies itself with this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot

The checklist

1. Allow OAI-AdsBot in robots.txt

OpenAI’s crawlers follow robots.txt, and a Disallow stops the review immediately. A blanket Disallow: / for all crawlers blocks OAI-AdsBot too. Add a group that allows it:

User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /

A crawler named in its own group ignores the rules under User-agent: *, so copy any Disallow lines for private folders into this group. Our robots.txt guide for AI crawlers explains the matching rules in full.

2. Allow OAI-SearchBot as well

OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot alongside OAI-AdsBot. For product-feed ads it matters more: OAI-SearchBot must be able to reach the URLs that host your product images, so check the image host too.

3. Check your firewall, CDN and bot protection

Bot protection can block OAI-AdsBot before it reaches the page. OpenAI notes that Cloudflare verifies OAI-AdsBot as a known crawler. If your setup needs IP addresses, OpenAI publishes them at openai.com/adsbot.json and openai.com/searchbot.json.

4. Watch for 403 and 429 responses

A 403 means something refused the crawler. A 429 means rate limiting slowed it down. If you upload many ads at once, OpenAI suggests spreading them over smaller batches.

5. Remove CAPTCHAs and login walls

A crawler cannot sign in or solve a CAPTCHA. Use a public landing page for every ad.

6. Make sure the link works with tracking added

OpenAI recommends UTM parameters on ad links, and live ChatGPT ads also arrive with extra parameters added by OpenAI, such as oppref and olref. Some sites return an error or redirect to the homepage when they see unfamiliar parameters, and some redirects quietly drop your UTM tags. Open your landing page with the parameters attached and confirm it loads the same page with the tags still in the address bar.

7. Keep redirects short and on your own domain

Each redirect is another chance to break. A destination on a different domain can also look like a mismatch with the ad. Use the final URL as the destination.

8. Match the page to the ad

OpenAI’s ad policies apply to landing pages as well as ad copy, and ads can be rejected if they are misleading or inconsistent. The page’s headline and first lines should state the same offer, product and price as the ad.

9. Put the main content in the HTML

OpenAI has not said whether OAI-AdsBot runs JavaScript. If your offer only appears after scripts run, the crawler may not see it. View the page source and confirm the headline, price and key details are there.

What a checker can and cannot tell you

If you are choosing a tool for this, we compared the options in ChatGPT Ads landing page checkers compared.

Any outside checker, ours included, makes requests from its own servers, not OpenAI’s. A firewall may treat OpenAI’s crawler differently, in either direction. That is why our readiness check marks each finding as Confirmed, for things we observed directly such as a robots.txt rule, or Possible, for things that may affect OpenAI’s crawler. A clean result means no problems were found, not that approval is guaranteed. After submitting, check the ad’s status in Ads Manager.

For advertisers in the Philippines

OpenAI began rolling out ChatGPT Ads in the Philippines on September 23, 2026, with self-service buying for eligible businesses through Ads Manager. OpenAI also notes that some new self-service accounts can only advertise in their home country at first, and become eligible for other countries after identity verification and a level of spend. If you run campaigns for clients abroad, confirm your account’s eligibility before you plan the launch.