Applebot
| Vendor | Apple |
| Type | Search index crawler (Siri, Spotlight, Safari Suggestions) |
| robots.txt token | Applebot |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes |
| Honors robots.txt | Yes |
| Vendor docs | support.apple.com/HT204683 |
User-Agent strings
Desktop:
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)iPhone variant exists with iOS UA prefix.
Purpose
Crawls the public web for Apple's search-driven features: Siri suggestions, Spotlight results, Safari address-bar suggestions, and the relevant grounding sources for Apple Intelligence's web-aware features. Apple's only first-party web crawler.
Network identity
- Hostname pattern:
*.applebot.apple.com - IP list: published at
https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
In our audit
In v1 (top 30): blocked at wikipedia.org, cloud.microsoft, live.com, and ebay — sites with reverse-DNS verification that correctly rejected our spoofed Applebot UA from a non-Apple IP. This is correct behavior on those sites' part.
In v2 (top 100): part of the AI-bot cluster blocks where some sites chose to include Applebot in their "block AI bots" preset. Apple has publicly stated Applebot supplies both search features (Siri, Spotlight) and Apple Intelligence — a complete block costs the site its Siri-search visibility as well.
How to allow / block
To allow Apple Search visibility:
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /To opt out of Apple AI training only (while keeping search features working), use the distinct Applebot-Extended token (next file).
Quirks
- Older than the AI-bot wave — Applebot has existed since 2014 for
Siri's web search. Some sites blocking "AI bots" inadvertently block their Siri/Spotlight visibility.
- Renders JavaScript via WebKit (the Safari engine).