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.
• 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 the older Search/Siri features Applebot was built for — a broader decision than an AI-training-specific opt-out.
• If your goal is narrowly “opt out of AI training, keep everything else,” Applebot-Extended is the correct, narrower token — the same pattern as Google’s Google-Extended next to Googlebot.

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.