# Applebot

Apple says Applebot crawls the web for search in Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Enabling the token in robots.txt allows site content to appear in those results. The same page says crawled data may also train Apple foundation models, and that opting out of that training is the Applebot-Extended token, not this one. A nosnippet tag, not this token, is how the page says to opt out of broad world-knowledge answers. Apple says this crawler respects robots.txt on general search crawls aimed at Applebot, does not follow crawl-delay, and follows the Googlebot group when the file does not mention Applebot but does mention Googlebot. The page does not say that a Disallow removes the site from search. The iTMS user agent on the same page is not this token. Applebot-Extended is a different token and is not this card.

- Operator: Apple
- Kind: search
- robots.txt: respects_no_crawl_delay. The vendor says this crawler respects robots.txt on general search crawls aimed at this token, and does not follow crawl-delay.
- HTTP user-agent: 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) Apple publishes this as a desktop example of the search user agent. The same section publishes a mobile example that also contains Applebot/0.1, and says the advertised browser version changes while the general format stays. Match the token, not one full string. The iTMS user agent on the same page is not this token.
- When this token is absent: follows Googlebot. The checker reports this and does not apply it.
- IP list: http://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
- Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 (retrieved 2026-10-18)

## JSON

`curl -s https://whosthatbot.com/v1/crawlers/applebot`

## Check this token

tools/call with name check_robots is the same check at https://whosthatbot.com/mcp. Send `Content-Type: application/json` and `Accept: application/json, text/event-stream`. The pasted file disallows Applebot on `/docs` and allows `*`. The call does not fetch a host.

```
curl -s https://whosthatbot.com/mcp -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"check_robots","arguments":{"robots_txt":"User-agent: Applebot\nDisallow: /\n\nUser-agent: *\nAllow: /\n","path":"/docs","ids":["applebot"]}}}'
```

That call returns fetched_target false. This row is disallow via group Applebot, rule Disallow: /. follows_when_unmentioned is Googlebot and is not the decision.

Each card paraphrases the linked vendor page and was checked on source.retrieved. This is not legal advice. robots.txt is a request from the site owner. Botcard does not fetch third-party sites and does not suggest ways around a disallow rule.