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AppleChecked 29 Oct 2026

Applebot

Crawls for Siri, Spotlight and Safari, including answers that may link to the sources.

Run by
Apple
Used for
Search and AI answers
Follows robots.txt
Yes
Shut out by
4% of top websites

What blocking it changes

The site drops out of those results. If robots.txt does not name Applebot but names Googlebot, Applebot follows the rules for Googlebot.

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

Apple, read 29 Oct 2026
Figure 1How many shut out Applebot
Most visited websites4%27 of 669
S&P 500 companies0%2 of 410
From our two studies of 29 October 2026: the 669 most visited websites and the 410 S&P 500 companies whose robots.txt we could read. 40 of the websites and 7 of the companies name Applebot in the file. The website study, the S&P 500 study.

The lines to copy

To shut it out
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /
To let it in
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /

A crawler follows only the lines under the User-agent line that names it, and the lines under User-agent: * only when no line names it. So lines for one crawler do not change the rules for the others.

Apple publishes the addresses it crawls from, so a request can be checked against them: the list.

More from Apple

  • Applebot-Extended A setting that tells Apple whether it may use the pages Applebot collects to train its foundation models.