AI crawler index
What is Applebot?
Applebot is Apple's search engine crawler. Powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari; Apple says its data may also train Apple's foundation models.
At a glance
| Operator | Apple |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search engine |
| 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) |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the operator |
| Published IP ranges | https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json |
| How to verify it | Reverse DNS in the *.applebot.apple.com domain, or match the source IP against Apple's list. |
| Official documentation | https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 |
Should you block Applebot?
It is a classic search engine crawler. Blocking it removes you from that search engine and from the products built on its index, so most sites should allow it.
If robots.txt does not name Applebot, it follows the rules you set for Googlebot. It ignores Crawl-delay. To keep content out of model training, use Applebot-Extended instead.
How to block or allow Applebot in robots.txt
Block it everywhere:
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Allow it everywhere:
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /Rules are matched by the token on the User-agent line. Test the result with the robots.txt tester before you publish it.
Other Apple crawlers
- Applebot-Extended: robots.txt control token
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker tells you which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the log file analyzer shows how often each one actually visits. For the bigger picture, see what AI crawlers are and the full AI crawler index.
FAQ
Applebot questions
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