What is Applebot?
Applebot is Apple's web crawler that gathers data to power search features across Apple's ecosystem including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari search functionality. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Apple |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
Applebot revisits your site on a flexible schedule, often requesting several pages in a burst. Activity usually increases when your content changes or its index refreshes, with quiet intervals between crawl passes.
Applebot's User Agent
| User Agent | 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) |
How To Block Applebot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Applebot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI search crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Applebot # https://knownagents.com/agents/applebot
Disallow: /Global Statistics for Applebot
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
7% of top websites block Applebot in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Search Crawler Traffic
1.9% of all web traffic came from AI search crawlers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by Applebot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Applebot?
Usually not. Blocking Applebot keeps your pages out of its AI search results and can eliminate referral traffic from that channel. It does not improve traditional search rankings. For context, 7% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Applebot.
Does Applebot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Applebot is expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether Applebot respects it.
Does Applebot Access Private Content?
No special access. Applebot can reach only content available to anonymous visitors. Make sure staging sites and other sensitive areas require authentication.
Why Is Applebot Visiting My Website?
Applebot is updating an AI search index so your pages can appear in its results. It may have discovered your site through links, a sitemap, or mentions of your domain.
How Can I Tell if Applebot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from Applebot and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using Applebot's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Applebot". Look for bursts that follow links across several pages and recur over time. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be Applebot.