Applebot

What is Applebot?

Applebot is the web crawler used by Apple to index web content for its various services, most notably Siri, Spotlight Suggestions, and Safari. This official web crawler was first announced by Apple in 2015 as the company expanded its search capabilities beyond relying solely on third-party search providers. As a standard web crawler, Applebot systematically browses the web to discover, analyze, and index web pages, images, and other content that can then be served to users through Apple's services.

The crawler identifies itself in server logs with the user agent string that includes Applebot along with additional information about the crawler version and system. Apple maintains official documentation about Applebot where administrators can learn more about its behavior and how to control its access.

Applebot operates similarly to other major search engine crawlers, following links from page to page to discover content across the web. It respects standard crawler directives and will honor robots.txt files. The crawler helps Apple build and maintain its own search index, which powers results in Siri, Spotlight, and Safari without always needing to rely on third-party search engines.

Why is Applebot crawling my site?

Applebot is visiting your website to gather information that may be relevant to Apple users through services like Siri, Spotlight Search, and Safari. The crawler is particularly interested in indexing content that could answer user queries or provide useful information when someone searches using Apple's services.

The frequency of Applebot visits typically depends on how often your content changes and how relevant Apple's algorithms consider your content to be for their users. Sites with frequently updated, high-quality content that's popular with Apple device users may see more frequent crawling activity.

Applebot's crawling is generally triggered by the need to keep Apple's search index fresh and comprehensive. When new content is published or existing content is updated, Applebot may visit to capture these changes. This crawling is authorized and legitimate as part of the normal functioning of the web, though site owners have control over how much access they want to grant.

What is the purpose of Applebot?

Applebot serves as the foundation for Apple's independent search capabilities, collecting and indexing web content to power search results across Apple's ecosystem. Its primary function is to support Apple's search features in Siri, Spotlight, and Safari, allowing users to find relevant information without always relying on third-party search engines.

The data collected by Applebot is used to build and maintain Apple's search index, which helps the company provide more relevant, timely, and personalized search results to its users. This index allows Apple to offer search functionality directly within its operating systems and applications.

For website owners, having content properly indexed by Applebot can increase visibility to the large audience of Apple device users. This can drive additional traffic from Safari, Siri recommendations, and Spotlight searches. The bot's crawling is generally beneficial for websites looking to reach Apple's user base, though it does consume server resources like any crawler.

How do I block Applebot?

Applebot respects the standard robots.txt protocol, making it straightforward to control its access to your site. If you want to completely block Applebot from crawling your entire website, you can add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /

If you only want to block Applebot from specific sections of your site while allowing it to crawl others, you can use more selective directives:

User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /private-directory/
Disallow: /members-only/
Allow: /

Apple confirms in their documentation that Applebot follows the same robots.txt rules as Googlebot. This means you can also use the same directives you might use for Google's crawler.

Keep in mind that blocking Applebot will prevent your content from appearing in Apple's search results, including Siri responses and Spotlight suggestions. This could potentially reduce your visibility to Apple device users, which represent a significant portion of mobile and desktop users. Before implementing complete blocks, consider whether selective blocking of sensitive content might be a better approach than blocking the crawler entirely.

If you need to verify that a crawler is legitimately from Apple, their documentation explains that you can perform a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address, which should resolve to a domain ending with apple.com or applebot.apple.com.