Applebot
Apple's search / answer indexing crawler.
Quick answer
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. It gathers publicly available pages to power search features built into Apple's own ecosystem, including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari, separate from the crawlers run by other search engines or AI assistant companies for their own products.
What it does
Applebot crawls public web pages so Apple can power the search technology built into Spotlight, Siri, and Safari, the search and assistant features many iPhone and Mac users rely on daily. It respects standard robots.txt directives during these general search crawls, following the same disallow and allow conventions most crawlers use. One detail unique to Applebot is what happens when a robots.txt file doesn't mention Applebot by name but does mention Googlebot: Apple's crawler then follows whatever rules were written for Googlebot instead of crawling freely. Apple publishes Applebot's IP ranges at a public URL, so a site owner who wants to confirm that traffic claiming to be Applebot is genuine can check it against that published list.
Facts
Operator
Apple
Robots token
Applebot
User agent string(s)
- 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)
Purpose
Search / answer indexing
Respects robots.txt
Yes
IP ranges
http://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
From Apple's documentation, checked Oct 2026.
Should you block it?
Blocking Applebot removes a page from Spotlight search results, Siri's spoken answers, and Safari's built in search suggestions, three surfaces a lot of iPhone and Mac owners use throughout the day without opening a browser tab. For a brand or publisher that wants to be findable on Apple devices, that is a meaningful amount of visibility to give up. The tradeoff is more about search presence on Apple's platforms than about appearing in a major AI assistant's conversational answers, since Applebot's documented role here is search indexing rather than model training. One practical wrinkle worth checking: a site that already blocks Googlebot but never wrote a rule naming Applebot will have Applebot follow the Googlebot rule anyway, which can lead to Applebot being blocked without anyone intending it.
How to block it
robots.txt can block Applebot like this: User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /not-allowed/ If a robots.txt file has no rule naming Applebot but does have one for Googlebot, Applebot will follow the Googlebot rule instead, so it is worth adding an explicit Applebot rule to avoid an accidental block.
Frequently asked questions
What does Applebot's crawl power?
Apple says Applebot's crawled data powers search features including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari.
What happens if robots.txt doesn't mention Applebot?
If the file mentions Googlebot but not Applebot, Apple's crawler follows the Googlebot instructions instead.
Can I verify traffic is really Applebot?
Yes. Apple publishes Applebot's IP ranges at search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json for verification.
Related
- AI crawler directory — every AI crawler's robots.txt token, purpose and facts in one place.
- Free AI crawler checker — check which AI crawlers a domain's robots.txt actually allows or blocks.
- Glossary — definitions of the AI-visibility terms that come up alongside crawler behavior.
Sources
- Applebot's crawled data powers search features like Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 (checked Oct 2026)
- Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives in general search crawls. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 (checked Oct 2026)
- If robots.txt doesn't mention Applebot but mentions Googlebot, Apple's crawler follows the Googlebot instructions. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 (checked Oct 2026)
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