OpenAI crawlers started running JavaScript, traffic spiked

Server logs from atsoho.com show OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot began executing JavaScript and rendering pages on September 25, 2026, instead of only fetching HTML. OAI-SearchBot requests rose from 1,253 to 41,444 per day and GPTBot from 83 to 152,009, though up to 97% of the traffic was Next.js prefetches.

• OAI-SearchBot requests rose from 1,253 to 41,444 per day on September 25
• GPTBot requests climbed from 83 to 152,009 per day by September 28
• Up to 97% of GPTBot requests were prefetches, not real pages
• Pages rendered by GPTBot grew more than 100x