Operated by Apple
Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. It powers Siri and Spotlight suggestions, as well as Apple Intelligence features.
Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. It powers Siri and Spotlight suggestions, as well as Apple Intelligence features.
Applebot is a production-grade search engine crawler operated by Apple. It uses a distributed crawl infrastructure that respects crawl-delay directives, follows RFC 9309 (robots.txt) spec, and processes Sitemaps to prioritise fresh content. The user-agent string Applebot must be whitelisted if your site uses rate-limiting or WAF rules. Blocking impact is Critical — Blocking removes you from search results.
<code>User-agent: Applebot</code> — Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.
Applebot is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility).Understanding Applebot's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.
Applebot. This is the exact string you must use in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. User-agent matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive, but the string must be spelled correctly. You can verify that a request genuinely comes from Applebot by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP — legitimate bots resolve back to their operator's domain.Applebot is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility)./robots.txt file:
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /This instructs Applebot not to crawl any path on your site. The Disallow: / directive covers the entire domain including subfolders. To only block specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g.,
Disallow: /blog/). Note: robots.txt is publicly readable — any bot or human can inspect it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.Applebot (case-insensitive grep: grep -i "Applebot" /var/log/nginx/access.log). You can also check Google Search Console → Coverage → Crawl Stats for Googlebot variants. For Applebot specifically, filter by user-agent in your log analysis tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).Disallow: / you can restrict Applebot to specific paths:
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /staging/ Allow: /This allows Applebot everywhere except the listed paths. Path matching in robots.txt uses prefix matching —
Disallow: /private/ blocks /private/page.html but NOT /public/private/.https://aicrawlercheck.com/robots.txt and scanning for Applebot entries. If a block exists, immediately test it against your most important URLs using the Google Search Console URL Inspection tool.yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any User-agent: Applebot or User-agent: * Disallow rules covering your key pages.
2. Remove or restrict the blocking rules.
3. Validate via Google Search Console → robots.txt Tester.
4. Request re-indexing using the URL Inspection tool.
5. Wait 1-2 weeks for re-crawl. Monitor Coverage report for recovery.