ChatGPT Ads Readiness Check

Why a landing page gets rejected

OpenAI's advertiser guidance is unusually direct about this. Advertisers must allow OAI-AdsBot to access ad landing pages so the page can be checked against OpenAI's policies. It also recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot, which helps decide when your ad is relevant and crawls product image URLs in feeds.

The part most advertisers miss is that robots.txt is only half the story. OpenAI lists web protection services, CAPTCHAs, authentication and bot-mitigation rules among the common reasons a crawler is refused. A site can have a perfectly clean robots.txt and still fail review because a firewall rule nobody remembers setting is quietly returning a challenge page.

And there is no support ticket that fixes it. OpenAI says not to rely on a manual bypass. You fix the access problem, then resubmit the ad.

What this checker will not tell you

If your site sits behind Cloudflare or a similar service, we can see that the protection exists. We cannot tell you whether it admits the real OAI-AdsBot, because these services usually verify a crawler by IP address rather than by the name it gives. A correctly configured one will refuse our test request and let OpenAI through, which looks identical from outside.

So we flag it and tell you where to look instead of guessing. A check that quietly gets this wrong is worse than no check at all.

The half that matters even without ads

Several of these checks are not about advertising. Whether your content is in the HTML or only appears after JavaScript runs, and whether you publish structured data saying what your business is and where it operates, decide whether an AI assistant can describe you at all. A page with no structured data gives ChatGPT nothing definite to quote when somebody asks for a supplier in your category.