Applebot-Extended

Operator

Apple

Type

AI Data Scraper

Official page

support.apple.com

robots.txt token

Applebot-Extended

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

A robots.txt control token, not a crawler. It sets whether content Applebot crawled can be used to train Apple's foundation models.

Applebot-Extended is only used to determine how to use the data crawled by the Applebot user agent.

Apple

User agent

Requests from Applebot-Extended carry a user agent like this:

Applebot-Extended

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Applebot-Extended

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Applebot-Extended

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

User-agent: Applebot-Extended Disallow: /private/

Apple

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

It never fetches pages. Disallowing it doesn't remove a site from Apple search results.

Applebot-Extended does not crawl webpages. Webpages that disallow Applebot-Extended can still be included in search results.

Apple

How Vireo counts Applebot-Extended

Vireo keeps requests from Applebot-Extended out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Applebot-Extended's user agents.

Sources

• Apple: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)