Applebot-Extended: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What Applebot-Extended is
Applebot-Extended collects pages to train future models. It does not decide whether Apple can cite you in an answer today — that is a different crawler with a different token. Blocking Applebot-Extended is a decision about your content being learned from, not about your visibility.
Operator: Apple
robots.txt token: Applebot-Extended
User-agent on the wire: none — this is a control token, not a crawler
Category: Model training
Applebot-Extended is the entry people most often get wrong. Blocking it does not remove you from Apple's search results, and allowing it does not add you to anything. It governs one thing: whether content Apple has already crawled may be used for AI.
What blocking it actually costs
Opts your content out of Apple Intelligence training. Applebot keeps crawling for Siri and Spotlight either way.
How to block Applebot-Extended
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /
The token must appear on its own User-agent: line. A named group replaces the User-agent: * group rather than adding to it, so anything you also want disallowed for this crawler has to be repeated inside its group.
How to allow Applebot-Extended
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Allow: /
An explicit allow is worth writing even when you have no blanket block: it documents the decision, and it survives someone later adding a restrictive User-agent: * rule without thinking about AI crawlers.
How to confirm your rule is actually in place
Because nothing ever arrives carrying Applebot-Extended, you cannot confirm this rule from your server logs — there is no request to look for. The only way to check is to read robots.txt back the way Apple does: confirm the Applebot-Extended group exists, is spelled exactly right, and is not silently overridden by a more specific group further down the file.
The AI Crawler Access Checker does that for Applebot-Extended and every other AI token in one pass, and names the exact line that decides each verdict.
Official documentation
Apple documents Applebot-Extended at https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829.
Common questions
- Does Applebot-Extended actually crawl my site?
No. Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token, not a crawler. No request ever arrives carrying it as a user-agent. Apple crawls with its regular crawler and then reads the Applebot-Extended group to decide whether that content may be used for AI. This is why you will never see Applebot-Extended in your server logs, and why any tool that lists a user-agent string for it is wrong.
- How do I block Applebot-Extended?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended Disallow: /The group must name
Applebot-Extendedon its own line. AUser-agent: *group does not combine with a named one — under RFC 9309 the most specific matching group replaces the wildcard entirely, it does not inherit from it.- What does blocking Applebot-Extended cost me?
Opts your content out of Apple Intelligence training. Applebot keeps crawling for Siri and Spotlight either way.
- Can I tell a real Applebot-Extended request from a fake one?
Not reliably. Apple does not publish verified IP ranges for Applebot-Extended, so the user-agent string is the only signal, and anyone can send it. Treat robots.txt as a statement of policy rather than as enforcement.
Is Applebot-Extended blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it — a firewall rule can block Applebot-Extended while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free