What is Applebot?
It crawls the web to power search in Apple products such as Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Apple says its data may also be used to train Apple's foundation models and give AI features up-to-date context.
Crawls pages for a classic search index. Blocking it removes you from that search engine.
If robots.txt does not mention Applebot but mentions Googlebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules. It does not support Crawl-delay. Apple's separate iTMS agent for Apple Podcasts does not follow robots.txt.
Applebot user agent
Apple documents these user agents for Applebot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole 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)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)Should you block Applebot?
Allow it unless you want out of that search engine. Blocking a major search crawler removes your pages from its results.
How to block Applebot in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
Disallow Applebot-Extended to keep content out of Apple's foundation model training, and use the nosnippet meta tag to keep it out of AI-generated answers in Siri and Search.
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Applebot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Apple publishes the IP ranges Applebot crawls from. A request that claims to be Applebot from any other address is not Applebot.
Or check by reverse DNS: look up the hostname of the request’s IP, confirm it ends in applebot.apple.com, then look that hostname up again and confirm it points back to the same IP.
See when Applebot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Apple’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.