Applebot-Extended

Safe Block: Depends Verified robots.txt: Yes

Apple control token used to opt out of Apple using crawled content to train foundation models.

Key facts

Operator: Apple
Family: Apple
Purpose: Control Token
User-Agent: Applebot-Extended
Should you block it?: Depends
Verified: Yes
Respects robots.txt: Yes
Identity type: Official Documented
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Last checked: 2026-04-01

Bot details

Identity

User-Agent: Applebot-Extended
robots.txt token: Applebot-Extended
Aliases: Apple AI opt-out token

Ownership

Operator: Apple
Family: Apple
Type: Ai
Purpose: Control Token

Verification and trust

Source type: Official
Confidence: High
Last verified: 2026-04-01
Last checked: 2026-04-01
Verification: Control token only; no separate crawl traffic is expected.
Operator URL: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829
Source URL: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829

Blocking and detection

Robots

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

Cloudflare

(http.user_agent contains "Applebot-Extended")

Advanced server rules

Apache

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Applebot\-Extended [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]

Nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Applebot-Extended") { return 403; }

Notes

Applebot-Extended is not a crawler. Apple says it is used only to determine how Apple may use data already crawled by Applebot, especially for foundation-model training.

Disallowing Applebot-Extended does not remove pages from Apple’s search features if Applebot itself is still allowed.

Evidence and source

Control token only; no separate crawl traffic is expected.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829

Key facts

Bot details

Identity

Ownership

Verification and trust

Blocking and detection

Robots

Cloudflare

Apache

Nginx

Notes

Evidence and source

Related bots

Same family: Apple

Applebot

Apple App Site Association

Apple Podcasts

Similar purpose: Control Token

Google-Extended

webzio-extended