Applebot-Extended

The same shape as Google-Extended: a control token, not a crawler. Applebot fetches the page either way; this decides whether the content may train Apple Intelligence.

13.6% of the 2,228 domains Domduck read on disallow it, against 12.8% on .

Operated by
Apple
Blocked by
13.6%
304 domains
Allowed by name
1.6%
the file names it
Not named
88.2%
the file is silent
Sample
2,228
domains read
Token
Applebot-Extended
in robots.txt

What blocking Applebot-Extended costs

Your content stops being used to train Apple’s foundation models.

What it does not cost

Siri, Spotlight and Safari search continue to use your site exactly as before. Those are Applebot, which is a different token.

Apple’s own documentation

How to block it

or allow it explicitly
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

To allow it and say so, use a bare Disallow: with nothing after it, which RFC 9309 defines as “nothing is disallowed”. That matters more than it looks: a file that never names an agent leaves it in a third state, neither allowed nor blocked, and a catch-all rule added later will block it without anyone deciding to.

Block rate over time

2 days
2026-08-022026-08-03

The percentage of domains in the corpus whose robots.txt disallows Applebot-Extended, measured once per domain per pass. The denominator is how many domains were read that day and is stored with each point, so the line is not restated when the corpus grows.

The other seven

OpenAI
GPTBot
Anthropic
ClaudeBot
Perplexity
PerplexityBot
Common Crawl
CCBot
ByteDance
Bytespider

How this page is made

The explanation above is written by a person. The numbers are computed from Domduck’s own daily reads of each domain’s robots.txt, parsed to RFC 9309 rather than searched for a string: a rule binds to the nearest preceding group of user-agent lines, the longest matching pattern wins, and Allow breaks a tie. No prefix matching is done, so a group naming Google is not treated as a policy about Google-Extended. What the collectors have read.

Applebot-Extended: what it is, and who blocks it | Domduck