What Apple Podcasts does
Apple Podcasts traffic is generated by Apple's iTMS user agent, which is documented on Apple's Applebot support page as one of the user agents Applebot powers. It only crawls URLs associated with content registered on Apple Podcasts, and its requests may come from applebot.apple.com hosts. It identifies itself with the header "User-Agent: iTMS".
How to identify Apple Podcasts
Temso identifies Apple Podcaststraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
\biTMS\b|Podcasts\/\dApple Podcasts FAQ
What is Apple Podcasts?
In server logs, Apple Podcasts appears as Apple's iTMS user agent, which crawls only URLs associated with content registered on Apple Podcasts. Its traffic may come from applebot.apple.com hosts.
Can I block Apple Podcasts with robots.txt?
No. Apple states the iTMS user agent does not follow robots.txt because it is not a general search crawler. It only fetches URLs tied to content registered on Apple Podcasts, so its requests result from that registration rather than from open crawling of your site.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
