Applebot

What is Applebot?

About

Applebot is a web crawler used by Apple to index search results that allow the Siri AI Assistant to answer user questions. Siri's answers normally contain references to the website. You can see how often Applebot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

AI search crawlers do not adhere to a fixed visitation schedule for websites. The frequency of visits varies widely based on many factors, and can even happen on-demand in response to a user query.

Type

AI Search Crawler
Indexes web content for AI-powered search results

Detail

Operated By Apple
Last Updated 9 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

5%
5% of top websites are blocking Applebot
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
Applebot normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Search Crawlers

Top Visited Website Categories

News
Health
Travel and Transportation
Food and Drink
Science
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Robots.txt

Should I Block Applebot?

Probably not. AI search crawlers power AI search engines, which are a useful way for users to discover your website. AI search engine assistants usually cite their sources and provide links to their results.

How Do I Block Applebot?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block Applebot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

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
# This should block Applebot

User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /

References