# Applebot > Applebot is Apple's crawler for search indexing. Serves Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. Apple is indexing your page for Siri and Spotlight. **Category:** AI crawlers **Also known as:** Apple Applebot **Updated:** 2026-09-09 **Source:** https://truestat.io/glossary/apple-applebot --- ## What Applebot is Applebot is a search crawler, not a training one, however often it is described otherwise. It feeds Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions. Apple controls training separately through the Applebot-Extended robots token, which is not a crawler and never appears in a log — so blocking Applebot in the hope of opting out of training gets the trade exactly backwards. Apple crawls for Siri, Spotlight and Safari suggestions, and controls training through a separate robots token rather than a separate crawler. That design catches people out: blocking the crawler to opt out of training loses the search placement and stops no training at all. On this site Applebot is counted as indexing, which is the row it appears in on your dashboard. The category matters because it decides which number moves when this crawler visits, and the four are reported separately for exactly that reason. ## What its traffic looks like A steady crawl over time rather than a burst: robots.txt first, then pages in waves, revisiting the ones that change often. Volume tracks how large and how frequently updated your site is. A sudden increase usually follows a sitemap change or a burst of new pages, and a sudden stop is worth investigating — it often means a robots rule or a server error rather than a decision by the operator. ## How it is verified Checked as ip ranges + reverse dns. The user agent has to carry the token, and then the address is compared against what Apple publishes — refetched every six hours, so a newly announced range is picked up without a deploy. A request that matches neither is recorded as unverified rather than as a forgery: a published list can be incomplete, and an accusation needs evidence. Only a reverse DNS record resolving to somebody else produces a spoofed verdict, which is proof rather than the absence of it. ## If you block it You disappear from Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. Apple uses a separate token, Applebot-Extended, to control training — so blocking Applebot to opt out of training costs you the search placement and achieves nothing you wanted. Treat this as a search-engine decision rather than an AI one, because that is what it is. The question is whether the people you want are looking through this engine, and your own analytics answer it better than any general advice can. It is worth checking what you actually lose before writing the rule. Blocking an index crawler is one of the few changes here with an effect that compounds quietly: nothing breaks on the day, and traffic simply stops arriving over the following weeks. ## One real request ```text 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) ``` ## Questions ### Is Applebot in my logs really Apple? Not necessarily, and that is why it is worth checking. Any script can send Applebot as its user agent. Apple publishes the addresses its crawler uses, so the claim can be tested against them — a request from outside those ranges is recorded as unverified rather than accepted. ### How do I match Applebot in my own logs? Match the token as a substring of the user-agent header, case-insensitively. Apple adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a rule pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version number, while a rule matching Applebot keeps working. ### Does Applebot run JavaScript? No. It requests the HTML and leaves. That is why a browser-based analytics tag never records these visits: the tag is JavaScript, and nothing runs it. Seeing this crawler at all requires reading it server-side. ### Why is Applebot counted as Indexing? Because that is what the fetch is for. The four categories separate what a crawler came to do rather than who sent it, so a visit from Apple moves this row and not the others. Where an operator publishes nothing to settle the question, we say so on the page rather than choosing quietly. ### Why does Applebot not show up in Google Analytics? Google Analytics runs in the browser. This crawler never opens a browser — it requests the HTML, reads it, and leaves, so the tracking script is never executed and no event is ever sent. Every browser-based analytics tool has the same blind spot, which is why crawler traffic has to be read from the server side to be seen at all. ### What happens if a Applebot visit cannot be verified? It is recorded as unverified, not as a forgery. A published address list can be incomplete or behind — an operator can start using a range before it appears in the file — so a miss is not evidence of anyone pretending. A visit is only marked as spoofed when the address's own reverse DNS record resolves to somebody else, which is proof rather than absence of proof. ## Related - https://truestat.io/glossary/fcrdns - https://truestat.io/glossary/spoofed-crawler --- From the TrueStat glossary — https://truestat.io/glossary. Privacy-first web analytics that also shows you which AI assistants are reading your site.