AI crawler · Apple · Model training
Applebot-Extended: what it is, its user agent, and how to block it
Applebot-Extended is Apple's robots.txt token for AI training. Decides whether content Applebot has crawled may be used to train Apple's generative models. In our 13 October 2026 study, 246 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (10.5%) disallow Applebot-Extended. Part of the AI crawler list.
What Applebot-Extended does
Operator: Apple. Job: Model training. Obeys robots.txt.
“Web publishers can opt-out from having their content used to train generative foundation models by disallowing Applebot-Extended in the robots.txt file.”
Applebot-Extended user agent
robots.txt token: Applebot-Extended (matched case-insensitively).
Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token, not a crawler: it never appears in a User-Agent header or your logs. Apple's main crawler does the fetching, and a Applebot-Extended group only decides how that data may be used.
robots.txt: allow or block Applebot-Extended
Allow
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /Block
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /Training only, not citations. Blocking it is a training opt-out. It doesn't decide whether any AI search answer can cite you.
Once a group names Applebot-Extended, it ignores your User-agent: * rules, so copy any paths you still want blocked into it.
How many top sites block Applebot-Extended
Disallow Applebot-Extended in robots.txt
10.5%
246 of 2,332 sites
In our 13 October 2026 study, 246 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (10.5%) disallow Applebot-Extended.
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-Extended 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-Extended
- Finds the group Applebot-Extended 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-Extended?+
Applebot-Extended is Apple's robots.txt token for AI training. Decides whether content Applebot has crawled may be used to train Apple's generative models.
What is Applebot-Extended's user agent?+
Applebot-Extended has none: it is a robots.txt token only. Use User-agent: Applebot-Extended in robots.txt.
How do I block Applebot-Extended?+
Add "User-agent: Applebot-Extended" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Obeys robots.txt, per Apple.
Does blocking Applebot-Extended affect AI search citations?+
Blocking it is a training opt-out. It doesn't decide whether any AI search answer can cite you.
How many websites block Applebot-Extended?+
In our 13 October 2026 study, 246 of 2,332 live top sites with readable robots.txt rules (10.5%) disallow Applebot-Extended.