In short. Applebot collects web content for Apple search, with DNS and IP verification and separate controls for crawling, indexing and model training.

Definition: Applebot is Apple's web crawler, which collects web content for search features in Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Apple's documentation, as of 17 October 2026, also describes uses of crawled content for model training and answers, with separate publisher controls.

Key facts

Apple's About Applebot documentation identifies Applebot in search crawler user-agent strings and provides desktop and mobile examples.
Apple's Applebot IP CIDRs file publishes network address ranges under prefixes, with entries named ipv4Prefix.
The IETF's Robots Exclusion Protocol specification defines /robots.txt as the location for crawler rules and states that these rules are not access authorization.

How is an Applebot request identified?

A user-agent string identifies the software making a request. Apple's identification guidance describes a browser-style string containing Applebot and a version. The advertised browser version changes over time, so Apple's examples are illustrative.

For network verification, Apple documents DNS, the system that associates domain names with IP addresses. A reverse lookup maps the requesting address to a hostname under applebot.apple.com; a forward lookup checks that the hostname resolves to the same address. Apple's example uses these commands:

host 17.58.101.179
host 17-58-101-179.applebot.apple.com

The documented hostname is 17-58-101-179.applebot.apple.com. Another verification method compares the requesting address with Apple's published network ranges.

How are crawling and rendering controlled?

The robots.txt file contains instructions for crawlers. Apple's crawler rules support rules addressed to Applebot for general search crawls. This group matches the Applebot-specific part of Apple's example:

User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /private/

Here, /private/ is excluded from crawling. When instructions omit Applebot but name Googlebot, Applebot follows the Googlebot instructions. Applebot ignores crawl-delay; Apple describes automatic rate adjustment when a site slows down or returns errors.

Rendering means processing a page in a browser to produce its displayed content. Applebot may render pages, and blocking required JavaScript or CSS resources can prevent correct rendering. Access checks therefore include resources needed to display the page.

Which controls affect indexing and content use?

Indexing makes a page available for search retrieval. Apple's indexing documentation supports robots meta tags in the HTML document's head: noindex excludes the page from the index, while nosnippet suppresses descriptions and web answers and excludes the tagged data from additional context supplied to AI models.

Apple also supports an HTTP response header, useful for resources such as PDFs:

X-Robots-Tag: applebot: nosnippet

Applebot-Extended is a content-use control for opting out of training Apple's foundation models. It performs no crawling itself. Pages that disallow Applebot-Extended remain eligible for search inclusion, and Apple says its rules are excluded from Search ranking considerations.

FAQ

Can I block model training while allowing Apple search crawling?

Yes. Apple's Applebot-Extended guidance provides a separate training opt-out in robots.txt. You can retain Applebot crawling while disallowing Applebot-Extended.

Does every request from an Applebot hostname follow the same rules?

Apple also documents the iTMS user agent for URLs associated with registered Apple Podcasts content. Its documentation states that this crawler ignores robots.txt, so you need to distinguish it from general search crawling.

Sources

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