Apple · Training crawlers
Applebot-Extended
Apple’s robots.txt-only opt-out for AI training. Disallowing it does not remove you from Apple search, Spotlight, or Siri results that use Applebot.
- Operator
- Apple
- Traffic type
- Training crawlers
- Verification
- Robots token, no HTTP crawler
- robots.txt
- Not an HTTP crawler
Usually means: Bots that collect public pages for future models. Blocking them opts you out of training. It does not, by itself, remove you from live AI search citations.
User-agent
robots.txt and most WAF rules match the token, not the full Mozilla string. Operators often wrap Applebot-Extended in extra product or version text.
Applebot-Extended
What Applebot-Extended does
Applebot-Extended is not a crawler. It tells Apple whether Applebot-crawled content may be used to train Apple’s generative models.
How to get discovered
Stay in Apple search via Applebot. Use Applebot-Extended only if you want to opt out of Apple model training.
Why Applebot-Extended might skip you
Like Google-Extended, it will not show up as its own crawl. Looking for Applebot-Extended in access logs is the wrong check.
robots.txt rule
This token is matched in robots.txt only. You will not see it as a separate user-agent in access logs.
# Robots.txt-only token — not a separate HTTP crawler
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /No IP ranges: this token never hits your server as its own user-agent.
Sources
JavaScript: reads raw HTML only.
Other Apple bots
Training, search, and user-fetch tokens from the same operator are not interchangeable. Allow the discovery path even when you opt out of training.
Applebot-Extended FAQ
What is Applebot-Extended?
Applebot-Extended is not a crawler. It tells Apple whether Applebot-crawled content may be used to train Apple’s generative models.
Should I allow Applebot-Extended in robots.txt?
Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt-only switch, not a crawler that hits your server. Use it to opt out of training-style use without expecting a new user-agent in the logs.
How do I know a request is really Applebot-Extended?
Applebot-Extended is not an HTTP crawler, so you will not see it in access logs. It only appears as a robots.txt User-agent group.
Letting Applebot-Extended in is the start. Getting cited is the job.
Rankealo checks whether AI crawlers can reach you, then publishes pages built to be retrieved and quoted in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
