What is Applebot? AI crawler guide

Applebot by Apple: Apple crawler for search experiences across Spotlight, Siri, Safari, and related Apple surfaces. Check its reported user-agent, robots.txt behavior, source, and verification guidance.

Apple crawler for search experiences across Spotlight, Siri, Safari, and related Apple surfaces.

What is Applebot?

Applebot is the web crawler operated by Apple that gathers content for search experiences across Spotlight, Siri, Safari, and related Apple surfaces. It identifies itself with the user-agent token Applebot and honors the Robots Exclusion Protocol, respecting directives in robots.txt. Applebot is categorized as a search crawler, meaning its primary role is to discover and index publicly available web pages so they can appear in Apple's search features.

What it's for

For a site owner, Applebot's visits can make your content discoverable in Apple's search ecosystem, including Spotlight suggestions, Siri answers, and Safari search results. If you block Applebot, your pages may not appear in these Apple search experiences, potentially reducing traffic from users on Apple devices. Apple also offers a separate user-agent, Applebot-Extended, which you can use to control whether your content is used for training Apple's foundation models, giving you finer control over how your data is utilized.

Whether to allow Applebot is a policy call. Either way, check which AI platforms actually send you human visitors before assuming crawl volume equals value.

How to handle Applebot

To allow Applebot full access, you do not need to add any specific directives to your robots.txt file. If you wish to restrict Applebot from crawling certain parts of your site, you can add a disallow rule for the Applebot user-agent token. For controlling use of your content in Apple's machine learning training, you can target Applebot-Extended separately without affecting search indexing. Always verify your robots.txt syntax to ensure it is correctly interpreted by Applebot.

robots.txt rule

User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /

Blocking cost

Blocking Applebot can prevent your content from appearing in Apple's search experiences, which may reduce visibility and traffic from users on Apple devices.

Examples

• Applebot crawls a recipe blog, and the recipe later appears as a Siri suggestion when a user asks for similar dishes.
• A news article is indexed by Applebot and surfaces in Safari's search results when a user queries a related topic.
• An e-commerce product page is crawled by Applebot, enabling it to show up in Spotlight search on an iPhone.

Related bots

• Amzn-SearchBot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• Bravebot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• Claude-SearchBot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• OAI-SearchBot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• YouBot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• Bingbot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• Meta-WebIndexer: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• Kimi-SearchBot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• KlaviyoAIBot: Also tracked as a search crawler.
• Robots.txt: Robots.txt is the control file used to allow or block Applebot.
• Apple Intelligence: Applebot connects this operator term to its crawler behavior.
• Timpibot: Also tracked as a search crawler.