Applebot-Extended: Apple's robots.txt token
Applebot-Extended belongs to Apple. It is not a separate crawler. It is a name you use in robots.txt to say whether content fetched by the operator's existing crawlers may be used for AI. Disallowing it opts your content out of that AI use. It has no effect on normal search crawling.
| Operator | Apple |
|---|---|
| Used for | Apple Intelligence |
| Type | robots.txt token |
| robots.txt name | Applebot-Extended |
| User agent | None of its own: it is a robots.txt token |
| Published IP ranges | None published |
| Blocked by top sites | 9.3% of 740 (study) |
| Official documentation | support.apple.com/en-us/119829 |
Apple says Applebot-Extended doesn't crawl pages; it only decides how data crawled by Applebot is used. Disallowing it doesn't stop Applebot, so your pages stay discoverable in Spotlight, Siri and Safari.
Allow or block Applebot-Extended in robots.txt
To block it on the whole site:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (useful when a rule for all bots would block it):
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /Disallowing it opts your content out of training Apple's generative models.
robots.txt is a request, not a wall. A CDN or firewall rule can turn a bot away even when robots.txt allows it, and nothing in the file will show that.
The free check requests your home page as a browser and as AI bots, reads your robots.txt and shows what gets blocked. No sign-up.
Check my siteSee Applebot-Extended on your own site
Applebot-Extended doesn't run JavaScript, so analytics scripts never record it. AI Visibility in PageLens reads it from your server or CDN and shows which pages it requested, when, and which requests ended in a 404.