Applebot
Apple · Answer index · robots.txt token applebot
What it is definition
Crawls for Siri, Spotlight and Safari search; falls back to Googlebot rules and ignores Crawl-delay.
Applebot is operated by Apple and classified here as answer index. These agents build the index an answer engine queries at question time. Disallowing one removes the site from those answers and from the citations that link back to it. Training is governed by separate tokens, so this is the expensive block, not the protective one.
Disallowing applebot removes the site from the index Siri, Spotlight and Safari search queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.
- robots.txt token
- applebot
- Operator
- Apple
- Purpose
- Answer index
- Honors robots.txt
- yes
- Documentation
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829
Identity on the wire exact string
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)curl -A '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)' https://example.com/Replace the host with your own. A 403, a challenge page or an empty body means the edge is blocking the agent whatever robots.txt says.
How to allow it, how to block it robots.txt
User-agent: applebot
Allow: /Absent any rule, the agent is already allowed, so this group only matters when your * group disallows something. Naming the agent replaces the * group for it entirely, so repeat here every disallow you still want to apply to it.
User-agent: applebot
Disallow: /Disallowing applebot removes the site from the index Siri, Spotlight and Safari search queries when it answers a question. The engine can then neither quote nor link the page, which is a traffic decision rather than a licensing one. Model training is governed by separate tokens.
Sites that block it 60 shown
Compare Apple
Apple runs 2 agents in this registry, and they do different jobs. Blocking one says nothing about the others.
Common questions answered
Does blocking Applebot remove me from Siri, Spotlight and Safari search?
Yes, in effect. Applebot builds the index Siri, Spotlight and Safari search reads at question time, so disallowing it takes the site out of those answers and out of the citations that link back to it. This is the block that costs traffic.
How do I verify Applebot requests are genuine?
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the source address. It must resolve to a host under applebot.apple.com, and a forward lookup of that host must return the same address.
Check your own site free
See whether your robots.txt admits Applebot today, and whether your edge agrees with it.