Applebot
Apple's search and citation crawler. Blocking it removes you from Siri, Spotlight, Safari search and Apple Intelligence citations.
| Operator | Apple |
|---|---|
| What it does | Search & training |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | Other AI assistants |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
Applebot renders JavaScript, so it sees client-side content that the AI crawlers miss.
It has one behaviour worth knowing, and most robots.txt files get the benefit of it by accident: if your file names Googlebot but says nothing about Applebot, Applebot follows your Googlebot rules. So a file that carefully allows Google and never mentions Apple is, in practice, allowing Apple too — and a file that disallows Googlebot has also just disallowed Apple without saying so.
The robots.txt rules
To block Applebot:
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly — worth doing when your file also contains a blanket User-agent: * disallow, since the most specific matching group wins and a token with no group of its own falls back to the wildcard:
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /If neither rule is present, Applebot is allowed. That is the default, and it is why an accidental block is nearly always something that was added rather than something that was forgotten — usually a snippet copied from a blog post that listed more tokens than the author intended to block.
One exception worth knowing: if your file has no group for Applebot but does have one for Googlebot, Applebot follows those rules instead of the wildcard.
Is it blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt is only the half you can read. A CDN or bot-management rule can turn Applebot away while your file still says it is welcome, and that mismatch is invisible from the front of the site. We check both layers separately and tell you which one is doing what.
We request two things: your robots.txt and your homepage. No other pages, ever.
Official sources
- Apple’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges — the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from Apple
Other Apple tokens
- Applebot-Extended — Model training