Powers search features across Apple's products, including Spotlight, Siri and Safari. Apple says the data may also be used to help train its foundation models.
Source: support.apple.comOperator
Apple
Job
Search index
Builds the index an AI answer searches. Block it and you drop out of that product's results.
robots.txt
Follows robots.txt
Apple says Applebot respects standard robots.txt directives aimed at it, and follows Googlebot's rules when robots.txt names Googlebot but not Applebot.
Source: support.apple.comMozilla/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)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of your domain.
A crawler obeys only the most specific group that names it (RFC 9309), so a named group does not inherit the rules under User-agent: *. Repeat any paths you keep private, as the example does with /admin/.
User-agent: Applebot Allow: / Disallow: /admin/
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
Read from the robots.txt we serve. We want AI engines to read and cite this site, so every AI crawler is allowed everywhere except the app, the API and the sign-in pages (/dashboard/, /api/, /login, /signup, /sign-in, /sign-up). The file also declares Content-Signal: ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes.
User-agent: Applebot Allow: / Disallow: /dashboard/ Disallow: /api/ Disallow: /login Disallow: /signup Disallow: /sign-in Disallow: /sign-up
See the whole file. The same rules repeat in every group, because a crawler that matches a named group ignores the wildcard one.
Apple says Applebot does not follow crawl-delay.
Sources, checked 2026-09-24