AI crawlers · Apple

Applebot

Applebot is a crawler operated by Apple, and it builds the index an assistant answers from — the fact that decides everything else on this page.

What does Applebot actually do?

The most important Apple fact is not in this registry: Applebot-Extended. It is a robots token rather than a crawler - no request ever arrives carrying that name - and it is how Apple lets you opt out of your content being used to train Apple's generative models while staying present in Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions.

That separation makes Applebot unusually safe to allow. If your objection is training, the extended token addresses it directly. Blocking Applebot itself is the much heavier move, because this crawl is the only route into Apple's assistant and search surfaces across every device the company ships.

Apple documents Applebot as able to render pages rather than only reading raw HTML, so script-injected content can be seen and a page that fails without JavaScript may be captured as an empty shell. Note also that its reverse DNS suffix is applebot.apple.com, not apple.com - a check that accepts the shorter domain is looser than it looks.

That rendering ability makes Apple a misleading place to test whether your content is legible to AI search generally. Of the vendors in this registry only Apple and Google document a renderer; the rest say nothing about JavaScript execution in their crawler documentation, which is not a no but is certainly not an assurance. A client-side page that Applebot captures perfectly may reach every other agent as a navigation bar and a spinner.

CrawlClick files Applebot as a search index crawl. What the three crawl purposes mean.

Apple runs one agent in this registry, which makes Applebot the whole of the decision. Vendors that split the work across several tokens let a publisher decline one job and keep another; Apple publishes no second name here, so there is nothing to separate. Whatever you settle on for Applebot governs every use Apple makes of your pages until another token appears — which is a coarser instrument than it looks, and worth weighing before the search index label decides it for you.

Should I block Applebot?

Applebot gets blocked to stay out of AI training, taking Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions with it, when Applebot-Extended is the token that actually governs training use.

To block it anyway, add this to robots.txt (how the rules resolve):

User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /

Replace Disallow: / with Allow: / to permit it explicitly. A crawler that ignores robots.txt is not blocked by it either way — that is what verification and edge rules are for.

How do I verify Applebot is genuine?

Apple lets you check a request claiming to be Applebot against reverse DNS ending in .applebot.apple.com, published IP ranges. A user-agent header on its own proves nothing.

Its address list lives at https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json, and its reverse-DNS names end in .applebot.apple.com.

The verification procedure explains why a reverse lookup has to be forward-confirmed, and why a published range list has to be re-fetched rather than pinned.

How do I find Applebot in my logs?

Match the user-agent against "applebot", case-insensitively. Set the Applebot fetch count beside the visits Apple actually returns; that ratio is your crawl-to-referral gap for this engine.

Crawl-to-referral gap defines the ratio, and the rate-limiting guide covers what to do when the volume itself is the problem.

Registry last reviewed 2026-09-13.