Search index · Apple
Applebot
Applebot is Apple's crawler for its AI search index. It honours robots.txt.
- Operator
- Apple
- Purpose
- Search index
- robots.txt
- Honoured
- Last checked
Documented 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)Match on the token Applebot rather than the whole string, since the version number inside the string can change. A user agent alone can be forged, so verify it as shown below.
robots.txt rules
To block it everywhere:
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly, for example when a broader rule blocks other agents:
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /What blocking it changes
Apple says Applebot’s crawl powers search features in Spotlight, Siri and Safari; blocking it keeps your content out of those results.
- If robots.txt has no Applebot rules but has Googlebot rules, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules.
- Applebot ignores Crawl-delay.
How to verify a request is genuine
Apple says Applebot traffic is generally identified by reverse DNS in the *.applebot.apple.com domain; you can also match the IP against the Applebot ranges Apple publishes as JSON (linked from its page). Source: Apple: about Applebot.
Other Apple agents
Applebot-Extended: control token (no crawler)
Sources
Apple's documentation for Applebot, read on 15 Oct 2026. Operators change these pages without notice; check before relying on a detail.
Check how your site treats Applebot
The AI crawler access check reads your robots.txt and fetches a URL as this agent, so you see what a CDN or firewall does as well.
Run the free check All AI crawlers