What is Applebot ?
Applebot is the web crawler operated by Apple Inc. It is primarily used to index content for Siri and Spotlight search results. Applebot functions similarly to other crawlers like Googlebot, parsing web pages to enhance the relevance and quality of Apple’s search features. According to Apple’s official documentation, the bot follows common web standards and respects robots.txt directives. It may also be used in broader machine learning pipelines.
Who is operating Applebot ?
Applebot is operated by Apple Inc., headquartered in Cupertino, California. The bot supports Apple’s internal search infrastructure and services such as Siri Suggestions and Spotlight. It is part of Apple’s broader effort to reduce dependency on third-party search engines. Apple maintains documentation for site owners and provides verification methods to authenticate the crawler.
Why you should be interested in Applebot ?
For webmasters, Applebot affects how your site appears in Siri and Spotlight search results on Apple devices. If your site is not crawlable by Applebot, it may be omitted from these services. Moreover, Apple has introduced Applebot-Extended for AI training, and the standard Applebot may also interact with systems that contribute to Apple’s machine learning features. Explicit control is available via robots.txt.
How to block Applebot ?
1. robots.txt File:
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file
# block Applebot User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
2. Verify crawler identity:
Apple recommends using reverse DNS lookup to confirm requests actually originate from Apple servers (see official guide).
3. Blocking AI-related use:
To prevent reuse in AI training, block both Applebot and Applebot-Extended:
# block Applebot-Extended User-agent: Applebot-Extended Disallow: /
About the bot
Owner: Apple Inc.
Owner URL: apple.com
Bot URL: support.apple.com
Bot User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.0 Applebot/1.0
Respects robots.txt: Yes
