What is Applebot?
Apple's web crawler: its data powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari, and may also be used to train Apple's foundation models and to add context to AI-generated answers.
- Operator
- Apple
- Purpose
- Mixed use
- Feeds
- Spotlight, Siri, Safari, Apple foundation-model training for Apple Intelligence, Services and Developer Tools (unless Applebot-Extended is disallowed), Broad world-knowledge answers in Siri and Search
- robots.txt token
Applebot- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- IP ranges
- Published list
- Source
- Apple documentation
Applebot user agent
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)
Primary value is Apple's desktop example; variants are the mobile example and the published general format. Apple says the advertised browser version changes over time.
Match it in robots.txt with the token Applebot. User agents can be faked, so check requests against Apple's published IP ranges before trusting them. Reverse DNS should resolve to *.applebot.apple.com and the forward lookup should return the same IP; or match the IP against Apple's published CIDR JSON.
Should you block Applebot?
Allowing Applebot is what makes content eligible for Apple search results (Spotlight, Siri, Safari), so disallowing it gives that up; to opt out only of AI training, disallow Applebot-Extended instead.
Yes. Apple says Applebot follows robots.txt. “Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives…targeted at Applebot.” Obeys Googlebot rules if Applebot unnamed; ignores crawl-delay.
Block Applebot
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
Allow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot Allow: /
Other Apple crawlers
Apple uses separate user agents for separate jobs, so you can allow one and block another.
- Applebot-Extended (AI training): A secondary robots.txt token (it does not crawl) that controls whether content crawled by Applebot can be used to train Apple's generative AI foundation models.
Applebot FAQ
What is Applebot?
Apple's web crawler: its data powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari, and may also be used to train Apple's foundation models and to add context to AI-generated answers.
What is the Applebot user agent?
Applebot identifies itself as: 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). In robots.txt, match it with the token "Applebot".
Does Applebot respect robots.txt?
Yes. Apple says Applebot follows robots.txt.
How do I block Applebot?
Add "User-agent: Applebot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Allowing Applebot is what makes content eligible for Apple search results (Spotlight, Siri, Safari), so disallowing it gives that up; to opt out only of AI training, disallow Applebot-Extended instead.
Crawlable isn't the same as cited
Letting AI crawlers in is step one. Citedify checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews actually recommend your brand, and what to fix when they don't.
Facts on this page come from Apple's documentation, checked 2026-09-28. Sources: support.apple.com/en-us/119829