AI crawler reference
Applebot: Spotlight, Siri and Safari
Applebot powers the search technology built into Apple's ecosystem, including Spotlight, Siri and Safari. It is the search crawler rather than the AI training control — that is Applebot-Extended, which is a separate token with a separate decision attached.
The facts
Taken from Apple's own documentation.
- robots.txt token
- Applebot
- Operator
- Apple
- What it feeds
- Search index
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes.
- User-agent 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)
What each choice costs
Neither option is free. This is the trade.
If you allow it
Your pages stay discoverable through Spotlight, Siri and Safari suggestions.
User-agent: Applebot Allow: /
If you block it
You leave Apple's search surfaces. On iPhone-heavy audiences that is a real cost, and it is separate from any AI training question.
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
Deciding this alongside the other bots is easier in one place: build the whole file.
Worth knowing
- Applebot and Applebot-Extended are different decisions. The first is search, the second is training.
- Apple's surfaces are easy to overlook because they do not show up in a normal referral report the way a search engine does.
- Blocking this is a search decision, not an AI one.
Verify it
A user-agent header proves nothing on its own, because anything can send one. Apple publishes no IP list for this agent, so a request carrying this name cannot be confirmed as genuine.
Questions
Is this about Apple Intelligence?
No. Training for Apple's foundation models is controlled by Applebot-Extended. This token is about search.
What do we lose by blocking it?
Discoverability in Spotlight, Siri and Safari, which matters most for audiences heavily on Apple devices.
Does it obey robots.txt?
Yes, and Apple documents the directives it supports.
Guides that cover this
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