Applebot
Applebot is Apple's crawler. It feeds the discovery features of its ecosystem: Siri answers, Spotlight searches and Safari suggestions on iPhone, iPad and Mac. If you have customers with Apple devices, allowing Applebot helps them find you directly from their phone without going through Google.
- User-agent
ApplebotMozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Yes
- Official documentation
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block Applebot?
No. Blocking it removes you from Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions, the paths through which iPhone and Mac users discover businesses without opening a search engine. It brings no benefit in return.
Is Applebot the same as Applebot-Extended?
No. Applebot crawls for search (Siri, Spotlight); Applebot-Extended is a separate control that decides whether Apple can use what was crawled to train its AI models. You can allow one and block the other.
How do I know if Applebot visits my site?
Search for "Applebot" in your server logs. A curious detail: if you have no specific rules for Applebot in robots.txt, it will follow whatever rules you have set for Googlebot.