Quick answer: Applebot is Apple's web crawler. Its data powers search features across Apple products, including Siri, Spotlight, and Safari. It respects robots.txt, and when your file has no Applebot group but does have a Googlebot group, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules instead of the wildcard.
- Operator
- Apple
- Type
- Search crawler
- robots.txt token
Applebot- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- Used for
- Powering search features in Siri, Spotlight and Safari
- User agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)- How to verify
- Reverse DNS must end in applebot.apple.com, confirmed by a forward lookup
What is Applebot?
Applebot has crawled the web for years to support Siri and Spotlight suggestions. It renders pages much like a modern browser, so JavaScript-heavy pages are less of a problem for it than for simpler crawlers.
Apple controls AI training use with a separate token, Applebot-Extended. Applebot itself is about search features, so the choice to allow it is mostly a choice about appearing in Apple's search surfaces.
What happens if you block Applebot?
Blocking Applebot removes your content from Siri and Spotlight search suggestions and, because data Applebot collects is what Applebot-Extended governs, it also means Apple has nothing new from you to consider for training. Be careful with Googlebot-only groups: if you block Googlebot in a named group, Applebot may follow that rule too.
Should you allow Applebot?
Allow Applebot. Apple devices are an enormous search surface. If you want to exclude training specifically, use Applebot-Extended instead of blocking Applebot.
Check whether Applebot can reach your site
Enter your domain or a specific page. The checker reads your live robots.txt, picks the group Applebot would use (including Apple's documented fallback to your Googlebot rules), and applies the longest matching rule, the same way major crawlers resolve conflicts.
robots.txt rules for Applebot
Put each group in the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. User agent names are matched without regard to case, and the most specific matching group wins.
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Allow: /The rule most people get wrong: once Applebot has its own group, it ignores everything under User-agent: *. If your wildcard group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines inside the Applebot group too.
Common Apple setup: stay in Siri and Spotlight, opt out of Apple model training
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /How to verify real Applebot traffic
Apple says genuine Applebot traffic resolves via reverse DNS to a hostname in the applebot.apple.com domain, and a forward lookup returns the original IP. Apple also publishes Applebot's IP ranges for automated checks.
To see how often it visits, count requests by user agent in your access log. On a typical Nginx server:
grep -i "Applebot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -cApplebot compared with other Apple agents
| Agent | Operator | Type | Follows robots.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Applebot | Apple | Search crawler | Yes |
| Applebot-Extended | Apple | robots.txt control token | Yes, it only exists in robots.txt |
See all 20 agents side by side in the AI crawler directory.
Applebot FAQ
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