Applebot: Apple's search crawler
Apple's crawler for Spotlight, Siri and Safari suggestions.
- Free, no account.
- A few seconds.
- Nothing is stored.
Applebot at a glance
Everything Apple documents about it, with links to the source.
- Operator
- Apple
- Type
- Search engines
- Used for
- Spotlight, Siri and Safari suggestions
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Apple documents that Applebot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
- robots.txt token
Applebot- User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
- IP addresses
- search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
- Reverse DNS
- Resolves to *.applebot.apple.com
- Documentation
- support.apple.com/en-us/119829
How to block Applebot
Crawls for a search engine's index. Blocking it removes your pages from that search engine, and from the AI answers built on it (AI Overviews on Googlebot, Copilot on Bingbot).
Block the whole site
Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
Block only some paths
List the paths; everything else stays open to Applebot.
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /drafts/
How to verify Applebot
Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.
- 1
Find requests whose user agent contains "Applebot" in your server or CDN logs.
- 2
Check each source IP against Apple's published list (search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json). A request from outside it is not Applebot, whatever it says.
- 3
Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP. A genuine request resolves to a host under applebot.apple.com, and a forward lookup of that host returns the same IP.
- 4
Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.
Other crawlers from Apple
Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Apple's crawler for Spotlight, Siri and Safari suggestions. Apple says that if a site's robots.txt names Googlebot but not Applebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot rules.
Yes. Apple documents that Applebot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site: "User-agent: Applebot" followed by "Disallow: /". To close only part of the site, list those paths instead of "/". To enforce the block rather than request it, deny the IP addresses Apple publishes at your firewall.
Only indirectly. Applebot crawls for Apple's search, and AI features built on that search use the same index.
Checked against Apple's documentation on 29 September 2026.
Next: see whether AI recommends you
Letting the right crawlers in is the first step. AskWatch shows what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI answer when buyers ask about your category, and who they name.
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