OpenAI Operator is one of the company’s first AI agents—a research preview tool currently available to ChatGPT Pro users in the United States. Powered by a model called the Computer-Using Agent (CUA), Operator leverages the vision and reasoning capabilities of GPT-4o to interact with websites as if it were a human user. It can click links, scroll pages, fill out forms, and complete multi-step tasks autonomously.
While Operator’s primary purpose is to help users automate routine tasks, its ability to navigate and interact with the web means that it can also generate automated requests to websites. For site owners, this can translate into:
Since Operator (and similar AI agents) operates by simulating human behavior, its requests may not be easily distinguishable from those of genuine users—unless you implement specific measures to detect and block them.
As a first line of defense, you can instruct compliant bots not to crawl your site by adding directives to your robots.txt file. Although robots.txt is voluntary and won’t stop malicious or non-compliant bots, it is a useful method for guiding well-behaved crawlers.
Create or update your robots.txt file with the following content:
Web administrators have several options to block requests coming from AI agents like Operator. A common strategy is to examine the User-Agent header in incoming HTTP requests. OpenAI’s agents tend to include distinct substrings in their User-Agent strings—for example:
Add the following snippet inside your server block in your Nginx configuration file. The regular expression is case‑insensitive and matches any User-Agent that contains one of the target tokens:
You have two common approaches with Apache—using environment variables or mod_rewrite.
Option 1: Using SetEnvIfNoCase
Place these lines in your site’s .htaccess file:
Option 2: Using mod_rewrite
Alternatively, add the following rewrite rules:
For IIS, you can use the URL Rewrite module in your web.config file. Insert this rule inside the section:
In Caddy, define a named matcher that uses a regular expression on the User-Agent header. For example, in your Caddyfile:
The (?i) flag ensures the regular expression is case‑insensitive.
OpenAI’s Operator is an exciting development in AI automation—capable of performing tasks on behalf of its users without constant human oversight. However, if you run a website, you need to be aware that such AI agents may generate automated traffic that could have unintended consequences. Whether you’re concerned about server load, data scraping, or skewed analytics, the techniques outlined above for Nginx, Apache, IIS, and Caddy provide robust options for blocking requests from these agents.
By proactively monitoring and managing your site’s access controls, you can protect your site from unanticipated bot traffic while still welcoming genuine users. Stay vigilant, and consider these configurations as part of your broader web security strategy.