Apple · search and training
Applebot: user agent and how to block it
Everything on this page is taken from Apple's own documentation, quoted and linked, and was checked on 4 October 2026. Where the documentation is silent the page says so instead of filling the gap.
What it is
Operator: Apple. Kind, as listed here: search and training. Apple says the data Applebot crawls may also be used for training, and that disallowing Applebot-Extended opts out of that use.
“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.”
Source: About Applebot, checked 4 October 2026.
User-agent string
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)
This is the desktop example from Apple’s page. Apple publishes a general format with a mobile example as well, and says it will occasionally update the browser version it advertises.
Source: About Applebot. The robots.txt token to match is Applebot.
Does it obey robots.txt?
“Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives in general search crawls that are targeted at Applebot.”
Source: About Applebot, checked 4 October 2026.
Does it affect search?
“Enabling Applebot in robots.txt allows website content to appear in search results for Apple users around the world in these products.”
Source: About Applebot, checked 4 October 2026.
Crawl rate
“Applebot does not follow crawl-delay.”
Source: About Applebot, checked 4 October 2026.
What else Apple says
“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.”
Source: About Applebot, checked 4 October 2026.
robots.txt snippets
Two snippets that show the syntax for this token. They are examples, not advice: whether to allow or refuse Applebot is your decision, and the effects above are the vendor's description of them.
Allow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot Allow: /
Disallow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
How to verify requests
Apple says traffic from Applebot is generally identified by reverse DNS in the *.applebot.apple.com domain, or by matching the IP address against the CIDR prefixes in its published JSON file.
http://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
Source: About Applebot.
Questions
What is Applebot?
Apple describes Applebot like this: “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.”
Does Applebot obey robots.txt?
The Apple documentation says: “Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives in general search crawls that are targeted at Applebot.”
How do I block Applebot in robots.txt?
Add a group to robots.txt with the line “User-agent: Applebot” followed by “Disallow: /”. That is an example of the syntax, not a recommendation. On search, Apple says: “Enabling Applebot in robots.txt allows website content to appear in search results for Apple users around the world in these products.”
Also see the robots.txt tester for AI crawlers and the other entries in the AI crawler reference.
Last reviewed . Maintained by Cite Files — corrections to [email protected].