Applebot
Apple's web crawler for Siri and search
About this crawler
Applebot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Applebot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Applebot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
1.6%
Technical details
- Name
- Applebot
- Pattern
Applebot- Tags
- search-engine
- Reference
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829
- Added
- 2015/04/15
- rDNS suffixes
.applebot.apple.com- Instances
- 5 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely Applebot 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
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Applebot/0.3; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Applebot/0.3; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B410 Safari/600.1.4 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow Applebot:
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Applebot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Applebot") {
return 403;
}
← back to all crawlers