Applebot
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. It reads pages for search in Siri, Spotlight and Safari, and its data may help train Apple's AI models.
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. It reads web pages so Apple's products can find them: search in Siri, Spotlight and Safari, and the AI answers in Siri and search. Apple says the data may also help train the models behind Apple Intelligence. Its page about Applebot has the details.
If you want to show up when someone asks Siri or searches on an iPhone, Applebot needs to be able to read your pages.
The Googlebot catch
Applebot has one habit that surprises people. If your robots.txt has no rules for Applebot, but it does have rules for Googlebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules.
For example, say Fernhill Coffee's robots.txt keeps Googlebot out of its /shop/ pages while it rebuilds them, and says nothing about Applebot. Applebot will stay out of /shop/ too. If that's not what you want, give Applebot rules of its own:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /shop/
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /Search and training are separate
Blocking Applebot keeps Apple from reading your pages at all, which can keep you out of Siri and Spotlight. If you only want to keep your pages out of Apple's model training, leave Applebot alone and block Applebot-Extended instead. That name doesn't crawl anything. It tells Apple whether pages Applebot read may be used for training.
Checking a visit is real
Anyone can call their bot Applebot. Apple says a real visit comes from an address whose name ends in applebot.apple.com, which you can check with a reverse DNS lookup. Apple also publishes a list of the addresses it uses.
Applebot in AnswerOrbit
The Audit tab in Website shows, for each AI bot we know, whether your robots.txt lets it in, and whether its own rule or your general rule decides it. Connect your server logs and the Bot visits tab shows which bots visited. We only count a visit when its address checks out.