Applebot vs. Applebot-Extended: Search/Siri vs. Apple Intelligence

Apple operates Applebot, a long-established crawler for Siri and Spotlight Suggestions, and a newer, separate token specifically for generative AI training opt-out.

The two tokens

• Applebot — Apple’s general-purpose crawler, used since well before the current wave of generative AI products, for features like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. Apple’s own documentation additionally states that data it crawls “may be used to provide additional context and up-to-date content when AI models are used to generate output for display in Apple products and services” — a narrower, context-supplying role, distinct from model training.
• Applebot-Extended — controls use of website content for training Apple Intelligence and other Apple generative AI models, independent of the base Applebot crawl.

The decision

• Disallow Applebot-Extended if you want to opt content out of Apple’s generative AI training specifically, while keeping Siri/Spotlight functionality intact.
• Disallowing Applebot itself affects both the older Search/Siri features it was built for and the AI-generated-output context-supplying role described above — a broader decision than an AI-training-specific opt-out, and not one that leaves AI-adjacent uses entirely untouched.
• If your goal is narrowly “opt out of AI model training, keep everything else,” Applebot- Extended is the correct, narrower token — the same pattern as Google’s Google-Extended next to Googlebot. It does not, however, opt out of the base crawler’s separate context-supplying use described above; there is currently no narrower token for that specific use, only the broader Applebot disallow.

Common mistake CrawlPact flags

Because Applebot-Extended is the newer of the two tokens, some robots.txt files only contain a rule for Applebot and assume it also covers the newer AI-training opt-out. It doesn’t — the two tokens are matched independently, so an AI-training opt-out intent requires an explicit Applebot-Extended rule.

Check which of the two your own robots.txt actually covers with the AI crawler checker.