Applebot-Extended
An Apple robots.txt token with no crawler of its own. It lets publishers refuse the use of Applebot data to train Apple's foundation models, without affecting search.
| Operator | Apple |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Training — Apple foundation models (Apple Intelligence) |
| robots.txt token | Applebot-Extended |
| User-Agent | No crawler of its own: robots.txt token only |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the publisher |
| Official IP ranges | Not published |
| Reverse DNS | Not documented |
| Official documentation | https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 |
Live activity of Applebot-Extended
Applebot-Extended is not a crawler that visits sites: it is a token read from robots.txt by Apple's existing crawlers, so it never shows up in logs.
Last updated: 2026-10-25 12:07:01 UTC. See the Observatory
What Applebot-Extended does
Applebot-Extended does not crawl any pages. It is a secondary user agent used only to decide how Apple may use the data that Applebot has crawled.
What Apple states:
- Disallowing
Applebot-Extendedin robots.txt opts your content out of training Apple's general-purpose foundation models, which power generative AI features including Apple Intelligence, Services and Developer Tools. - Pages that disallow Applebot-Extended can still be included in search results.
- Even with Applebot-Extended disallowed and
nosnippetapplied, your rules may still let Applebot crawl the pages, which remain discoverable through Spotlight, Siri and Safari.
Do not confuse the two controls. Applebot-Extended is about training. Using content as context for AI-generated answers in Siri and Search, such as broad world-knowledge answers that link to sources, is governed by the nosnippet tag, not by this token. Apple also says pages marked isAccessibleForFree: false are not used as context for those answers.
Because no crawler uses this name, nothing appears under Applebot-Extended in your logs and there is no IP range or reverse DNS hostname to check. The requests themselves still come from Applebot.
Block or allow Applebot-Extended
Apple should stop using your content to train its foundation models. Your pages can still appear in search; use in AI-generated answers in Siri and Search is governed by nosnippet instead.
To block it, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (copy any private rules you have):
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /A group naming Applebot-Extended replaces the User-agent: * group for it. Build a complete robots.txt with the generator and check it with the tester.
Other Apple crawlers
- Applebot — Search