Search engine crawlers

What is Applebot?

Applebot is Apple's web crawler. Apple says it powers search features in Spotlight, Siri and Safari, and that the data it collects may also be used to help train Apple's foundation models. Applebot-Extended is the separate token for opting out of that training.

Last verified 2026-09-30 against the operator's documentation. All bots

Applebot at a glance

Operator: Apple
Type: Search engine crawlers
Purpose: Crawls pages for Spotlight, Siri and Safari search features.
robots.txt token: Applebot
Example 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)
How to verify: Run a reverse DNS lookup and check that the name ends in applebot.apple.com, then confirm with a forward lookup. Apple also publishes Applebot's IP ranges.
Reverse DNS: applebot.apple.com
IP ranges: https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
Operator documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829

How often is Applebot impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be Applebot failed verification.

Measured between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 3 July 2026 and 28 September 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be Applebot? Check its IP address.

Should you block Applebot?

Allow it if: you want to appear in Spotlight, Siri and Safari suggestions.
Block it if: you want no Apple crawling at all. Most sites that only object to training should use Applebot-Extended.
What blocking changes: Your pages stop appearing in Apple's search features. To opt out of training only, disallow Applebot-Extended instead.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Apple says Applebot follows your Googlebot rules when robots.txt does not name Applebot, and does not support Crawl-delay.

User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Applebot. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.