Applebot
Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions
What Applebot does
Applebot is Apple's web crawler. It feeds Siri, Spotlight and the suggestions Safari offers, which makes it a search crawler that happens also to matter for AI rather than an AI crawler in the sense the others on this list are.
That distinction decides how to treat it. Blocking Applebot removes you from Apple's search surfaces entirely, the way blocking Googlebot removes you from Google. It is not the lever for the training question, and Apple publishes a separate token for that.
Apple publishes an IP range list, which is the only reliable way to tell a real Applebot from something using the name.
Applebot is not Applebot-Extended
Applebot is the crawler. Applebot-Extended is a permission token attached to what Applebot has already fetched, and disallowing it does not stop the crawling.
What Applebot-Extended does insteadHow to block Applebot
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain, alongside what is already there rather than replacing it.
robots.txt
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /What that costs you: Apple's search surfaces have nothing of yours to show. This is a search crawler, not only an AI one.
To allow it instead, write nothing. A crawler with no group of its own follows your User-agent: * rules, and giving it a named group with Allow: / detaches it from those rules entirely — including any path you disallow there.
Find it in your logs
Apple names the token but does not publish a full user-agent string for it, so match on the token itself.
To find every visit it has made, and the addresses it came from:
Terminal
grep -F 'Applebot' /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnCheck that it is really Applebot
A user agent is a string the visitor chooses, so on its own it proves nothing — anyone can send yours. Apple publishes the addresses Applebot fetches from: 33 prefixes when we read the file, last changed on 31 July 2026. Take an address out of your logs and check it against that list.
Terminal
curl -s https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json | python3 -c "
import sys, json, ipaddress
addr = ipaddress.ip_address('203.0.113.10') # the address from your logs
nets = json.load(sys.stdin)['prefixes']
print(any(addr in ipaddress.ip_network(n.get('ipv4Prefix') or n['ipv6Prefix']) for n in nets))
"False means something else is wearing the name, and it is under no obligation to respect anything in your robots.txt. That is the traffic worth blocking at the edge, rather than the crawler that was asking politely.
What Apple says about it
The two tokens are independent
Apple states that even if you disallow Applebot-Extended and tag content with nosnippet, your instructions may still allow Applebot to crawl your pages. Crawling and training permission are separate decisions expressed in separate places.
Read from https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 on 14 September 2026.
Should you block Applebot?
Generally not. This is Apple's search crawler, and blocking it costs you Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions rather than buying you anything on the training question.
If the training question is what you care about, Applebot-Extended is the token for it, and it leaves Applebot's crawling untouched.
Questions
- Does blocking Applebot opt me out of Apple Intelligence training?
- No. Apple publishes Applebot-Extended for that, and states the two are independent: disallowing the training token does not stop Applebot crawling your pages for search.
The user agent and IP figures on this page were read from Apple’s own URLs on 14 September 2026. Blocking figures come from our survey of 170 well-known sites across 10 categories on 14 September 2026, 148 of which returned a readable robots.txt.
Is Applebot allowed on your site right now?
The checker reads your live robots.txt and reports every token in this directory, with the exact directive that decided each one.