Applebot-Extended
Apple · Training crawlers · User agent only
About this crawler
A robots.txt token that controls whether Apple may use content Applebot crawled to train its foundation models.
Usually means: Public content is being collected that may end up in model training data or large web datasets.
Apple crawls with Applebot; Applebot-Extended only states how the content may be used.
User agent
Applebot-Extended
Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt product token: Apple reads rules addressed to it, but its requests arrive under another user agent.
IP verification
Apple publishes no IP ranges for Applebot-Extended, so requests are identified by user agent only and recorded as unverified. Anyone can send this user agent.
Questions
- What is Applebot-Extended?
- A robots.txt token that controls whether Apple may use content Applebot crawled to train its foundation models. MetricRaven groups it under Training crawlers: crawlers collecting public pages that may be used to train AI models.
- How do I verify that a request really comes from Applebot-Extended?
- Apple publishes no IP ranges for Applebot-Extended, so only the user agent identifies it. Anyone can send that string, so treat it as a claim.
- How do I block or allow Applebot-Extended?
- Add a robots.txt group for "Applebot-Extended" with the paths to allow or disallow. Fetchers that act for a user may ignore robots.txt; block those at your server or firewall instead.
- How can I see when Applebot-Extended visits my website?
- Most crawlers never run JavaScript, so browser analytics miss them. MetricRaven's @metricraven/ai-crawl package reports crawler requests from your server, verifies their IPs against published ranges, and shows which pages each crawler reads.
See when AI assistants and crawlers read your site
Add one line to your server and MetricRaven shows which assistants, search engines and training crawlers request your pages, which ones are IP-verified, and the URLs they expected to find, including 404s.