| Operator | Apple |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search for Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions |
| robots.txt token | Applebot |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes. |
| If you block it | Pages stop appearing in Siri and Spotlight suggestions. |
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)Version numbers inside user-agents change over time. Match on the token (Applebot), never on the full string.
robots.txt examples
Block Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Allow Applebot, block a folder
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /A group for a specific crawler replaces the User-agent: * group for that crawler — rules are not combined. Repeat any rules from * that should still apply.
How to verify Applebot
Reverse DNS must end in applebot.apple.com.
The user-agent alone proves nothing — it is the first thing scrapers copy. See how to verify crawlers.
Is Applebot blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt may allow Applebot while your CDN or firewall refuses it. Test the real response with the Googlebot checker.
Official documentation: support.apple.com