Applebot: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt
Applebot is operated by Apple. It is classified here as Search (Search index). Verification method: Published CIDR list and reverse DNS.
Exact 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)
robots.txt token: Applebot. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be
forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.
How to verify Applebot is genuine
Match the source IP against Apple's published CIDR list: https://search.developer.apple.com/applebot.json
12 ranges published, as of 2023-10-27. Pulled live at build time, never hardcoded.
A reverse DNS path also exists. See .
How to block or allow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.
What blocking Applebot costs you
Applebot feeds Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Blocking it removes your content from search results across Apple's ecosystem, and because Apple lists this as the primary purpose ahead of any AI use, the visibility cost lands first and the training question is handled by a different token.
What is specific to Applebot
Apple names reverse DNS as the primary identification method and the CIDR file as the secondary one, which is the reverse of how most operators present it. Genuine Applebot addresses resolve under applebot.apple.com, and Apple's documentation walks through the two host commands needed to confirm both directions. Worth knowing when reading verification results: the published applebot.json carries a creationTime from October 2023, so like Bing's it is a long-lived list rather than a frequently rotated one. Apple also documents a separate nosnippet control for broad world knowledge answers in Siri and Search, which is independent of both Applebot and Applebot-Extended.
Verify a request claiming to be Applebot
Check a Applebot request against Apple's published ranges
Source
Primary documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829. Last verified 2026-08-02.
Other Apple crawlers
- Applebot-Extended - Control token, not a crawler