VercatusWhen ChatGPT may show a blocked URL as a navigation link
OpenAI's publisher FAQ (updated 2026) says a page disallowed for OAI-SearchBot can still appear as a bare link and page title when OpenAI learns its URL from a third-party search provider or from links on other pages and judges it relevant (the FAQ also named ChatGPT Atlas, which OpenAI has since deprecated, with a shutdown date of 9 August 2026); to prevent that, the page needs a noindex robots meta tag, which OAI-SearchBot can only read if robots.txt lets it crawl the page. Summaries and snippets require OAI-SearchBot access, and ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral URLs.
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