What Applebot does
Applebot crawls the web to power Apple products: Siri answers, Spotlight suggestions, and Safari search features. Content it fetches can also be used for Apple Intelligence features, with training controlled separately via the Applebot-Extended token.
Should I allow Applebot to crawl my site?
Allowing Applebot keeps you present across Apple's answer surfaces on iPhone and Mac. Training use is a separate decision: control it with Applebot-Extended without blocking the crawler itself.
How to control Applebot
Target Applebot in your robots.txt with the Applebot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /Block Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Apple documents Applebot's user-agent format and verification via reverse DNS in the 17.0.0.0/8 range.
Applebot FAQ
What is Applebot?
Applebot is Apple's web crawler; the data it collects powers search features across Apple's ecosystem, including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Crawled data may also be used to help train Apple's foundation models for generative AI features such as Apple Intelligence, a use publishers can opt out of separately by disallowing the Applebot-Extended token in robots.txt.
How do I block Applebot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Applebot" followed by "Disallow: /" or specific paths; Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives targeted at it. Apple documents two nuances: if robots.txt does not mention Applebot but does mention Googlebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules, and Applebot does not follow the crawl-delay directive.
About Search Engine Crawlers
Classic search indexers that now also feed AI features: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build on Googlebot's index, and Microsoft Copilot builds on Bingbot's.
Blocking these removes you from both traditional rankings and the AI answers built on top of those indexes, usually the most costly block of all.
