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Apple

Applebot

IndexingPublished CIDRsVerified July 2026

What it is

Applebot indexes the web for Apple search experiences including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Aiola classifies it as indexing because it supports a searchable retrieval index.

In Aiola's taxonomy, Indexing means crawled for ai or search indexing.

User agent

Look for the match token inside the complete HTTP User-Agent header. Tokens can be spoofed, so use the network checks below for authentication.

Full example User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)
Case-insensitive match token
Applebot

Official IP ranges

Apple publishes an official JSON feed. This cached snapshot contains 12 CIDR prefixes, last fetched 2026-07-11. Open the live source ↗

Applebot CIDRs — snapshot fetched 2026-07-11
17.22.237.0/24
17.22.245.0/24
17.22.253.0/24
17.241.193.160/27
17.241.200.160/27
17.241.208.160/27
17.241.219.0/24
17.241.227.0/24
17.241.75.0/24
17.246.15.0/24
17.246.19.0/24
17.246.23.0/24

Verify authenticity

Start with the source IP recorded by your trusted edge or server, not an untrusted forwarded header.

Test one CIDR in Python (replace REQUEST_IP)
python3 -c 'import ipaddress; print(ipaddress.ip_address("REQUEST_IP") in ipaddress.ip_network("17.22.237.0/24"))'
Reverse- and forward-DNS double lookup
host REQUEST_IP
# Confirm the hostname ends in an official suffix
host RETURNED_HOSTNAME
# The forward lookup must return REQUEST_IP

For production checks, test against every current prefix in the vendor feed. Re-fetch feeds regularly: a July 2026 snapshot is evidence of publication, not a permanent firewall list.

Control it with robots.txt

Apple documents crawler controls for this bot family. Robots.txt can direct cooperative crawling, but it cannot prove that a request is authentic.

Allow Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Allow: /
Block Applebot
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /

Read Apple's official crawler documentation ↗

Track it

Aiola tracks this crawler on your site — crawls, pages, trends. See when Applebot arrives, which URLs it requests, and how activity changes over time.

Explore Aiola Analytics

FAQ

What is Applebot?

Applebot indexes the web for Apple search experiences including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Aiola classifies it as indexing because it supports a searchable retrieval index.

What user-agent token identifies Applebot?

Match the case-insensitive token “Applebot” in the User-Agent header. A matching header alone does not authenticate the sender.

Can I verify Applebot by IP address?

Apple publishes a JSON feed, and this page snapshots 12 CIDR prefixes fetched on 2026-07-11. Match the source IP against the current vendor feed before trusting it.

Can robots.txt block Applebot?

Apple documents crawler controls for this bot family. Robots.txt can direct cooperative crawling, but it cannot prove that a request is authentic. Use the specific “Applebot” group when you want a rule for this identity without changing rules for every crawler.

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