Applebot (Apple): what it is and how to allow or block it
Applebot is Apple's crawler for search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Its robots.txt token is Applebot.
Facts
- Operator
- Apple
- Category
- Search engine crawler
- robots.txt token
Applebot
- Honors robots.txt?
- Yes, per Apple. Applebot follows robots.txt rules aimed at it; if there are none but Googlebot rules exist, it follows the Googlebot rules. It ignores crawl-delay.
- User-agent example
(Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
- Official source
- Apple: About Applebot
- Compared with the source
What it is used for
Crawls content to power search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Apple says the data may also help train its foundation models and provide context for AI-generated answers. A traditional search engine crawler. AI features of the same company often draw on its index.
What happens if you block it
Blocking Applebot removes you from those Apple search features. To opt out of model training only, use Applebot-Extended instead.
Apple documents verification by reverse DNS in the applebot.apple.com domain. Blocking JavaScript or CSS can hurt how it renders pages.
How to allow or block Applebot
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain. A group that names the bot overrides a general User-agent: * group.
User-agent: Applebot Allow: /
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
Does your site allow Applebot today? The checker evaluates your robots.txt for this and every other bot.Check my site
What we see on our own sites
No request identifying as Applebot has been recorded in the last 30 days, so there is nothing to show yet. We never fill this in with estimates.
Counts come from the websites we operate; they hold no IP addresses or URLs, and a user agent is only a claim. See the bot traffic data and the methodology.
Related bots
More from Apple
Other Search engine crawlers
- Googlebot GoogleGoogle's main crawler for Google Search. Google's AI features in Search draw on the same index.
- Bingbot MicrosoftMicrosoft's crawler for the Bing search index.
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