Whitelist OpenAI IP Ranges in NGINX and fail2ban

by Danila Vershinin, June 2, 2026

If you want ChatGPT Search, GPTBot, and OpenAI’s on-demand fetcher to actually reach your content, the answer is not just “set Allow: / in robots.txt.” Modern NGINX deployments lean on rate limiting, GeoIP rules, and fail2ban; each of those will silently choke an OpenAI bot if you don’t deliberately whitelist OpenAI IP ranges in every […]