Applebot

Applebot crawls for the search technology inside Apple products.^[1] Apple also states that the same crawled data may help train the foundation models behind Apple Intelligence and related features.^[2] One crawl, two uses, split across two robots tokens.

The user agent is a Safari string with the crawler name and a documentation URL appended.^[3] Apple documents reverse DNS as the identification method: real traffic resolves inside the applebot.apple.com domain.^[4]

Blocking Applebot removes the site from Siri and Spotlight suggestions, which is a live visibility loss on every Apple device. Publishers who want the visibility but not the model training disallow Applebot-Extended instead and leave this token alone.

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

Published IP list: https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json

A user agent is a claim, not a proof: any client can send any name. Where an operator publishes IP ranges, a reverse lookup is the only way to tell a real visit from an impersonation.