What is GPTBot and does it send traffic?
GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler for collecting training data. It reads pages but does not itself send shoppers back; answer features and agentic browsing are separate systems with different behavior.
GPTBot is OpenAI's documented crawler for gathering model training data. Visiting pages is its whole job - it is not a referral channel by itself. OpenAI's user-facing products (answer features, browsing agents) use related but distinct systems and user-agents.
The practical distinction for merchants: training crawlers take without directly giving, while answer and agent systems can send customers. A crawler policy that treats them identically either over-blocks a channel or over-shares with a harvester.