Technical

How to check which AI crawlers visit your WordPress site

Published October 13, 2026 · 5 min read

Short answer: search your web server's access logs for the user agent names OpenAI and Perplexity publish. Then check the source IPs against the lists they provide, because anyone can fake a user agent. Your host's control panel usually has the raw logs.

The names to look for

OAI-SearchBot: OpenAI says it is used to surface websites in ChatGPT search results.
GPTBot: OpenAI says it crawls content that may be used in training its models.
ChatGPT-User: used for certain user actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to it.
PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User: described in Perplexity's crawler documentation.

Find them in your logs

If you have shell access to a Linux server running Apache or Nginx, run this from the log folder. Paths differ between hosts.

On shared hosting, download the raw access log from your control panel and search it in a text editor. If your site sits behind a CDN, look at the CDN's logs too, since the origin server may only see the CDN's addresses.

Verify the source

OpenAI publishes IP lists for its agents, for example openai.com/searchbot.json, openai.com/gptbot.json and openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. Perplexity publishes perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json and perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. Compare the IPs in your log to those lists. A request that uses the user agent but comes from an address outside the list is not that bot.

What if you see nothing

Not seeing a bot does not prove it is blocked, and seeing one does not mean your pages will be cited. Check robots.txt, your firewall and any security plugin. Cloudflare, Sucuri and similar services can block requests before they reach WordPress.

Sources