About this bot
Applebot is a crawler associated with Apple and used for indexing.
The primary identifying User-Agent token is Applebot. Representative HTTP request identity: Mozilla/5.0 (Device; OS_version) AppleWebKit/WebKit_version (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/Safari_version [Mobile/Mobile_version] Safari/WebKit_version (Applebot/Applebot_version; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot).
Directory status: Active. Identity classification: Verified with High confidence. Identity type: official documented.
This identity is recorded as honoring robots.txt under Applebot. Site-specific access policy should still be evaluated before enforcement.
Risk classification: Safe. Recommended handling is to evaluate the request context before allowing, rate-limiting, or blocking.
How to identify this bot
- User-agent and crawler identifiers
-
ApplebotMozilla/5.0 (Device; OS_version) AppleWebKit/WebKit_version (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/Safari_version [Mobile/Mobile_version] Safari/WebKit_version (Applebot/Applebot_version; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot) - Also known as
- Apple search crawler
Details
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- Apple
- Purpose
- Indexing
- Common Use
- Powering Apple search experiences including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari; crawled data may also be used to help train Apple foundation models unless publishers opt out with Applebot-Extended.
- Respects robots.txt
- Yes
Verification
- Identity Type
- Officially documented
- Evidence Method
- Match the documented `Applebot` User-Agent format, then use forward-confirmed reverse DNS under `applebot.apple.com` when stronger verification is required.
- Detection Notes
- Match `Applebot` in the documented browser-like User-Agent. For authenticity checks, verify reverse DNS resolves to an `applebot.apple.com` hostname and forward-resolves back to the requesting address.
Website controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /