Applebot is a bot in the AI search crawlers category, operated by Apple.
Applebot data is used to power various features, such as the search technology that is integrated into many user experiences in Appleʼs ecosystem including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari.
AI search crawlers index pages so that AI answer engines can cite and link to them in their responses. Blocking them removes your pages from those answers, so many sites allow them while blocking training crawlers.
Sample user agent strings sent by Applebot:
Mozilla/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)(Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
Share of Applebot requests to sites protected by Transfon Security in the 7 days to 27 October 2026.
| United States | 100% |
| Apple Inc. AS714 | 99% |
Applebot follows robots.txt, so these rules stop it crawling the paths you choose. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Applebot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Applebot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Applebot group, Applebot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Applebot from Applebot's user agent; check Apple's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
Applebot decides whether AI answers cite and link your articles. Many publishers allow it while blocking training crawlers, and rate limit it so it does not crowd out readers.
Transfon Security for publishersAI search can send visitors to your landing pages. Keep Applebot's own visits out of campaign reports so you can measure the real referrals.
Transfon Security for advertisersBeing indexed by Applebot can put your products in AI shopping answers. Allow it on product and category pages, and keep it off cart, checkout and account pages.
Transfon Security for e-commerceLetting Applebot index docs and pricing pages helps AI answers describe your product correctly. Keep it away from login and API endpoints.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Applebot by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
Applebot is a bot in the AI search crawlers category, operated by Apple. Applebot data is used to power various features, such as the search technology that is integrated into many user experiences in Appleʼs ecosystem including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari.
Yes. Applebot follows robots.txt, so a Disallow rule for the Applebot user agent stops it from crawling the paths you list.
Add "User-agent: Applebot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Applebot" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Applebot may not follow it, and anyone can send Applebot's user agent, so a fake Applebot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
AI search crawlers index pages so that AI answer engines can cite and link to them in their responses. Blocking them removes your pages from those answers, so many sites allow them while blocking training crawlers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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