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Applebot-Extended: Apple Intelligence and Your Content

Applebot-Extended is Apple’s equivalent of Google-Extended: a robots.txt token, not a separate crawler. Regular Applebot crawls for Siri and Spotlight search; the Extended token controls whether that crawled content may also train Apple’s foundation models behind Apple Intelligence.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

You’ll only see Applebot in your logs:

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

The directives split the permissions:

# Siri/Spotlight search visibility (leave this alone)
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /


# Apple Intelligence training — your choice
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /

Blocking Applebot itself removes you from Siri and Spotlight suggestions across iPhone, iPad and Mac — rarely what anyone intends. Blocking only Applebot-Extended keeps search visibility while opting out of model training.

Should you allow it?

Section titled “Should you allow it?”

Apple Intelligence ships on-device across the iPhone install base, and its web answers lean on what Applebot has crawled and Apple’s models have learned. For consumer-facing businesses the audience is enormous and the opt-out buys nothing commercially — allow it. The block is for publishers with content-licensing positions.

The pattern to remember

Section titled “The pattern to remember”

Apple and Google both split “search crawling” from “AI training” with an -Extended token. OpenAI and Anthropic split it across separate bots instead. Either way, the AEO rule is the same: keep the search/retrieval path open, and treat the training opt-out as a business decision, not a security setting.

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