Applebot
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.
Applebot at a glance
| 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 | Yes, documentedsource |
| Verification method | Published 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. https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.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.
Allow or block Applebot
Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
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.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really Applebot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Applebot precisely because site owners allow it. Reverse DNS resolves under applebot.apple.com and must forward-resolve back to the same IP. Apple also publishes the ranges as JSON.
Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.
Other crawlers run by Apple
Related crawlers
Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand
Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.