Applebot: what it is and how to allow or block it
Applebot is Apple's web crawler that powers search features in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Its robots.txt token is Applebot. Apple says crawled data may also help train its generative models, which you can opt out of with Applebot-Extended. Disallowing Applebot itself removes your content from the results it powers.
| Operator | Apple, for Spotlight, Siri, Safari and Apple Intelligence |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search engine |
| robots.txt token | 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) |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes. Applebot respects Allow and Disallow, follows Googlebot rules if robots.txt does not mention Applebot, and does not follow crawl-delay. |
| Runs JavaScript | Yes |
| IP ranges | Published list |
| Documentation | Apple |
What Applebot does
Applebot crawls data that powers search features in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Apple says crawled data may also help train Apple's generative foundation models and supply up-to-date context for AI-generated answers in Apple products.
Should you block Applebot?
Allow Applebot to appear in Spotlight, Siri and Safari results, and use Applebot-Extended if you only want to opt out of training. Disallowing Applebot keeps your content out of the Spotlight, Siri and Safari results it powers. To opt out of foundation model training without leaving search, Apple provides the separate Applebot-Extended token.
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Rules that apply
- Rule 02: Treat training bots and search bots as separate robots.txt decisions
- Rule 01: Allow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot in robots.txt if you want AI citations
- Rule 03: Audit your CDN and WAF bot settings; they can block AI crawlers that robots.txt allows
- Rule 04: Ship primary content in the initial HTML; most AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript
Questions
What is the Applebot user agent string?
Apple's desktop example is: 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). Apple notes the advertised browser version is updated occasionally.
Does Applebot respect robots.txt?
Yes. It respects Allow and Disallow, and if robots.txt does not mention Applebot but mentions Googlebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules. It does not follow crawl-delay.
Does Applebot render JavaScript?
Apple says Applebot may render website content in a browser. If JavaScript, CSS or other resources are blocked in robots.txt, rendering may fail.
How do I verify Applebot?
Use reverse DNS in the *.applebot.apple.com domain, or match the IP against the CIDR prefixes in Apple's applebot.json file.
Sources
- About Applebot · Apple, Sep 4, 2026
- The rise of the AI crawler · Vercel, Dec 17, 2024
Checked against the operators' documentation every Monday. Last reviewed Nov 2, 2026.