AI search crawlers
Applebot is a bot operated by Apple that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Applebot is a web crawler used by Apple to index search results that allow the Siri AI Assistant to answer user questions. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Applebot can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Request says
"Applebot/0.1"
Checked against
Apple's IP ranges and reverse DNS
Live check
Paste the address from the log line. It is checked against what the operator publishes.
Reference
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.1 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot) |
|---|---|
| Operator | Apple |
| Purpose | AI search crawlers |
| Respects robots.txt | Honourssource |
| Verification method | IP ranges + DNSPublished IP ranges or reverse DNS Reverse DNS resolves under applebot.apple.com and must forward-resolve back to the same IP. Apple also publishes the ranges as JSON. |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | Applebot |
| Operator documentation | https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 |
Applebot is a web crawler used by Apple to index search results that allow the Siri AI Assistant to answer user questions. Siri's answers normally contain references to the website.
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking Applebot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
Applebot is a bot operated by Apple that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Applebot is a web crawler used by Apple to index search results that allow the Siri AI Assistant to answer user questions. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Applebot can be checked against a published IP range file or a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Yes. The operator documents that Applebot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.
Reverse DNS resolves under applebot.apple.com and must forward-resolve back to the same IP. Apple also publishes the ranges as JSON. The reference is published at https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json.
Add the Applebot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.
Blocking Applebot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.