AI crawler · Apple · Search and training under one name
Applebot: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
Applebot is Apple's search and training crawler. Powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Its data may also train Apple's foundation models and ground Siri answers. In our 13 October 2026 study, 81 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (3.5%) disallow Applebot. Part of the AI crawler list.
What Applebot does
Operator: Apple. Job: Search and training under one name. Obeys robots.txt.
“Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives in general search crawls that are targeted at Applebot.”
Applebot user agent
robots.txt token: Applebot (matched case-insensitively).
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)Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)Apple gives these as examples.
robots.txt: allow or block Applebot
Allow
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /Block
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Affects AI answers and citations. One name covers both search and model training, so a Disallow removes you from Apple's search features as well as its training data.
Once a group names Applebot, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block Applebot
Disallow Applebot in robots.txt
3.5%
81 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 81 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (3.5%) disallow Applebot.
Sample: Tranco top 5,000, tested once on 13 October 2026 from one Indian fixed-line connection. The robots.txt share counts live sites (home page 2xx) whose rules we could read, as on the AI visibility hub. Method and CSV in the study.
Check your own site
The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt the way Applebot does and tests what your firewall returns. To write the rules, use the AI robots.txt generator.
Check your page: free, about 20 seconds, no sign-in
What it checks
- robots.txt for Applebot
- Finds the group Applebot obeys under RFC 9309 and the rule that decides your page.
- What your CDN lets through
- Requests the page as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and compares the answers with a browser request.
- Content without JavaScript
- AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. The audit checks how much of the page is in the raw HTML.
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Questions
What is Applebot?+
Applebot is Apple's search and training crawler. Powers search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Its data may also train Apple's foundation models and ground Siri answers.
What is Applebot's user agent?+
Apple documents it as: 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). Match on the token Applebot, since version numbers change.
How do I block Applebot?+
Add "User-agent: Applebot" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per Apple.
Does blocking Applebot affect AI search citations?+
One name covers both search and model training, so a Disallow removes you from Apple's search features as well as its training data.
How many websites block Applebot?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 81 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (3.5%) disallow Applebot.