Applebot
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. Its data powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari, and Apple says it may also be used to train Apple's foundation models. Blocking Applebot removes your pages from those Apple search features; to opt out of training only, disallow Applebot-Extended instead.
What it does
Apple says data crawled by Applebot powers search features across its ecosystem, including Spotlight, Siri and Safari, and that allowing Applebot in robots.txt lets your content appear in search results for Apple users. The data may also be used to train Apple foundation models and to give AI models up-to-date context in Apple products.
Applebot respects robots.txt directives aimed at it. If your robots.txt does not mention Applebot but does mention Googlebot, Apple says Applebot follows the Googlebot rules. It does not follow Crawl-delay. Training use is controlled separately with the Applebot-Extended token.
In our 2026-11 study, 3.9% of popular sites with a robots.txt blocked it. →
robots.txt token
Applebot
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)How to allow it
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /How to block it
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /How to verify real visits
Apple says Applebot traffic can be identified by a reverse DNS lookup that returns a hostname in the applebot.apple.com domain; confirm with a forward lookup that the hostname resolves back to the same IP. You can also match the IP against the CIDR prefixes Apple publishes in applebot.json.