Applebot
Apple's crawler behind search in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Its data may also train Apple's foundation models unless publishers opt out through Applebot-Extended.
| Operator | Apple |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search — Spotlight, Siri, Safari and Apple Intelligence |
| robots.txt token | Applebot |
| User-Agent | 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) |
| Obeys robots.txt | Yes, according to the publisher |
| Official IP ranges | https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json — 24 ranges, list dated 2026-09-15 |
| Reverse DNS | applebot.apple.com |
| Official documentation | https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 |
Live activity of Applebot
No visit from Applebot recorded on iabig.com over the last 30 days.
Last updated: 2026-10-25 12:07:01 UTC. See the Observatory
What Applebot does
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. The data it collects powers search across Apple's ecosystem, including Spotlight, Siri and Safari, and allowing it lets your content appear in those results.
What Apple states:
- Applebot data may also be used to train Apple's foundation models, which power generative AI features such as Apple Intelligence, Services and Developer Tools. Publishers opt out of that through the
Applebot-Extendedtoken. - It may provide up-to-date context when AI models generate output, for example broad world-knowledge answers in Siri and Search. The
nosnippetmeta tag keeps content out of those answers. - Applebot follows robots.txt rules aimed at it. If no rule names Applebot but some target Googlebot, it follows the Googlebot rules.
- It does not support
Crawl-delay, and slows down automatically when a site gets slower or returns errors. - It may render pages, so blocking JavaScript or CSS can stop it from seeing the content properly.
You can verify Applebot with a reverse DNS lookup (hostnames under applebot.apple.com) or against the JSON file of CIDR prefixes that Apple publishes. The browser version advertised in the user-agent string is updated from time to time within the same general format.
Block or allow Applebot
Your pages are no longer crawled for Spotlight, Siri and Safari and may drop out of them. To refuse training only, disallow Applebot-Extended and keep Applebot allowed.
To block it, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (copy any private rules you have):
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /A group naming Applebot replaces the User-agent: * group for it. Build a complete robots.txt with the generator and check it with the tester.
Verify a Applebot visit
Anyone can write “Applebot” in a User-Agent. Paste the IP address and User-Agent from your logs into the IP verifier to know whether the visit is genuine.
Other Apple crawlers
- Applebot-Extended — Training