What is Applebot-Extended?
Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token, not a crawler. Apple says it does not crawl web pages: disallowing it tells Apple not to use content that Applebot crawls to train its foundation models.
- Operator
- Apple
- Purpose
- A robots.txt token that opts content out of Apple model training.
- robots.txt token
Applebot-Extended- How to verify
- There is nothing to verify: Apple says Applebot-Extended does not crawl. A request that uses the name is not from Apple.
- Operator documentation
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829
- Last verified
How often is Applebot-Extended impersonated?
No real crawler sends Applebot-Extended as its user agent, so every request that claims it is fake; there is nothing to verify.
This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 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-Extended? Check its IP address.
Should you block Applebot-Extended?
- Allow it if
- you are content for Apple to use your pages in model training.
- Block it if
- you want to stay in Apple search features but opt out of model training.
- What blocking changes
- Apple may not use your content to train its foundation models. Your pages can still appear in Apple's search features.
To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Apple reads this token from robots.txt. Applebot keeps crawling for search either way.
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Applebot-Extended. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.
Related bots
- Applebot (Apple): Crawls pages for Spotlight, Siri and Safari search features.
- Google-Extended (Google): A robots.txt token that controls Gemini training and grounding use.
See which bots reach your site, and which of them are who they claim to be.
Request a site audit