Applebot
Apple · AI search Training · robots.txt: Yes
Crawls and renders web pages for search in Apple's products such as Spotlight, Siri and Safari; the same crawl may also feed Apple's AI features.
Block Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Blocking Applebot removes your pages from search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. If you only want to opt out of AI training, Apple's documented route is to disallow Applebot-Extended and keep Applebot allowed.
Allow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block Applebot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Facts
- Operator
- Apple
- Purpose
- AI search index + Model training
Apple says Applebot's data powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari, may help train Apple's foundation models (opt out with Applebot-Extended), and may be used as context for AI-generated answers (opt out with nosnippet).
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Apple says Applebot respects robots.txt in general search crawls aimed at it. If your robots.txt does not mention Applebot but does mention Googlebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules. It does not follow Crawl-delay. The separate iTMS user agent (Apple Podcasts) does not follow robots.txt.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent string contains "Applebot/" followed by a version (for example Applebot/0.1).
- How to verify it
- Apple says Applebot traffic is identified by reverse DNS in the applebot.apple.com domain (check with the host command both ways), or by matching the IP against Apple's published CIDR list.
Published list: search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json — 24 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 15 Sep 2026. Always match against the live list; operators update them.
What Apple says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“The data crawled by Applebot is used to power various features, such as the search technology integrated into many user experiences in Appleʼs ecosystem including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Enabling Applebot in robots.txt allows website content to appear in search results for Apple users around the world in these products.”
“The data crawled by Applebot may also be used to help train Apple foundation models powering generative AI features across Apple products, including Apple Intelligence, Services, and Developer Tools. Web publishers can opt-out from having their content used to train generative foundation models by disallowing Applebot-Extended in the robots.txt file.”
“Applebot crawled data may be used to provide additional context and up-to-date content when AI models are used to generate output for display in Apple products and services.”
“Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives in general search crawls that are targeted at Applebot.”
“If robots instructions don't mention Applebot but mention Googlebot, the Apple robot will follow Googlebot instructions. Applebot does not follow crawl-delay.”
“The iTMS user agent does not follow robots.txt, as it is not a general search crawler.”
“The user-agent string contains ”Applebot” and other information.”
“Traffic coming from Applebot is generally identified by using reverse DNS in the *. applebot.apple.com domain.”
“Another way is to match the IP address with a CIDR prefix contained in the following JSON file: Applebot IP CIDRs.”
Sources
- Apple Support: About Applebot — fetched and checked 2026-09-22
- Apple: Applebot IP CIDRs (applebot.json) — fetched and checked 2026-09-22