Apple

Applebot

IndexingIP ranges + reverse DNS

Serves Siri and Spotlight Suggestions.

When you see it: Apple is indexing your page for Siri and Spotlight.

How we check it is really Apple

  1. 01

    The user agent has to contain Applebot.

  2. 02

    The address is compared against Apple's published ranges, which we refetch every six hours.

  3. 03

    If the ranges do not settle it, the address's reverse DNS record is resolved and then resolved forward again, so a faked record cannot pass.

A visit that matches neither is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A range list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence.

What each result means

verified
The address matched Apple's own published records. This really was them.
unverified
We could not confirm it, and that is all it means. The operator may publish nothing to check against, a published list may be behind the addresses actually in use, or DNS may simply have been slow. It is not an accusation.
spoofed
The address belongs to somebody else — its own reverse DNS record resolves to a different owner. That is positive evidence of a forgery rather than a failure to find evidence, which is why it is reported as its own result and never folded into the row above.

The distinction costs nothing to make and is the reason these numbers can be shown to someone who will ask where they came from. A report that cannot separate “we do not know” from “this was faked” invites exactly one question it cannot answer.

The lists this is checked against

Published by Apple and refetched every six hours. Open them; they are the same files we read.

Operator
Apple
Token
Applebot
Counted as
Search indexing
Verification
IP ranges + reverse DNS
Runs JavaScript
No
Operator docs
Published

User agent

Applebot

Matched as a token, not as a full browser string. Apple adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a filter pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version while one matching Applebot keeps working. The same string is what Apple names in robots.txt.

One real request

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)

Your analytics never mentioned Applebot because it cannot see it.

This crawler takes your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads it server-side, checks the address, and shows you which pages it fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.

Start trackingAll crawlers