Applebot-Extended
Whether your pages train Apple's foundation models
What Applebot-Extended does
Applebot-Extended is the second token in this directory that is not a crawler. Like Google-Extended, nothing ever visits your site under the name: it is a string you write in robots.txt to withhold permission for content Apple has already crawled to be used in training its foundation models.
Apple's own wording is unusually clear about the independence of the two. Disallowing Applebot-Extended does not stop Applebot crawling you, and it does not remove you from Siri or Spotlight. It governs what happens to the text after it has been fetched.
That makes it the cheapest training opt-out available, in the same way Google-Extended is: it costs no visibility at all on the surfaces Apple actually sends people through.
Applebot-Extended is not Applebot
Applebot-Extended is not a crawler. Nothing fetches your pages under that name; it withholds a permission for pages Applebot already has.
What Applebot does insteadHow to block Applebot-Extended
Name the token in robots.txt. There is no crawler to turn away, so this withholds a permission rather than refusing a request.
robots.txt
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /What that costs you: Nothing you can see. Apple states this governs training only, and disallowing it does not stop Applebot crawling you.
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
Nothing to find. No request ever arrives identifying itself as Applebot-Extended.
Check that it is really Applebot-Extended
There is nothing to verify. No request ever arrives identifying itself as Applebot-Extended: the token is read out of your robots.txt by Apple’s ordinary crawler, on their behalf, and applied to crawling that has already happened. Anything in your logs claiming to be Applebot-Extended is not what it says it is.
What Apple says about it
Crawling continues
Apple states that even if you disallow Applebot-Extended and tag website content with the nosnippet meta tag, your instructions may still allow Applebot to crawl your webpages. The opt-out is about use, not access.
Read from https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 on 14 September 2026.
Should you block Applebot-Extended?
A clean choice with no visibility cost, and the same shape as Google-Extended. If you would rather your pages did not train Apple's foundation models, this is the correct token and it takes nothing away.
What it will not do is remove you from Siri, Spotlight or Safari suggestions. Those come from Applebot, and that is a separate and much more expensive decision.
Questions
- Why does Applebot-Extended have no user agent?
- Because nothing crawls under that name. It is a permission token read out of your robots.txt by Applebot, on Apple's behalf, and applied to content already fetched. Anything in your logs claiming to be Applebot-Extended is not what it says.
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-Extended 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.