AppleNewsBot
Apple News content fetching and article updates
About this crawler
AppleNewsBot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern AppleNewsBot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as feed-reader, search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block AppleNewsBot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
0.065%
Technical details
- Name
- AppleNewsBot
- Pattern
AppleNewsBot- Tags
- feed-reader, search-engine
- Reference
- https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenews/preparing-image-video-audio-music-and-arkit-assets
- Added
- 2026/05/02
- rDNS suffixes
.applebot.apple.com- Instances
- 1 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely AppleNewsBot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.
.applebot.apple.com
Sample User-Agent strings
AppleNewsBot
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow AppleNewsBot:
User-agent: AppleNewsBot
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AppleNewsBot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "AppleNewsBot") {
return 403;
}
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