Applebot

Operator

Apple

Type

AI Search Crawler

Official page

support.apple.com

robots.txt token

Applebot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Apple.

Runs JavaScript

Yes, according to Apple.

Published IP ranges

search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

Apple's crawler for search features in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Apple says the data may also be used to train its foundation models unless Applebot-Extended is disallowed.

The data crawled by Applebot is used to power various features, such as the search technology integrated into many user experiences in Appleʼs ecosystem including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari.

Apple

User agent

Requests from Applebot carry user agents like these:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10 _1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)

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

Applebot

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

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
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 Allow: / Disallow: /private/

Apple

Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives in general search crawls that are targeted at Applebot.

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

If robots.txt has no Applebot rules, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules. It ignores crawl-delay.

If robots instructions don't mention Applebot but mention Googlebot, the Apple robot will follow Googlebot instructions. Applebot does not follow crawl-delay.

Apple

Does Applebot run JavaScript?

Yes. Apple says it does.

Applebot may render the content of your website within a browser. If javascript, CSS, and other resources are blocked via robots.txt, it may not be able to render the content properly.

Apple

How Vireo counts Applebot

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

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

Sources

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