What is Applebot-Extended?
Applebot-Extended is an Apple robots.txt token that lets publishers opt out of having content crawled by Applebot used to train Apple’s generative foundation models. It is not a separate crawler that fetches pages.
Apple crawls with Applebot for features such as Spotlight, Siri and Safari. According to Apple, the crawled data may also help train foundation models for Apple Intelligence and other generative features. Applebot-Extended is the switch that excludes only that second use.
Apple states explicitly that disallowing Applebot-Extended can still leave Applebot allowed to crawl. The content then remains discoverable through Spotlight, Siri and Safari. The pattern matches Google-Extended: a control token next to the actual crawler.
Because Applebot-Extended makes no fetches of its own, it does not appear in server logs. Whether the opt out applies can only be read from robots.txt, not tested from the outside.
What it means for your website
If you want to exclude Apple’s model training but stay discoverable in Siri and Spotlight, disallow Applebot-Extended and allow Applebot. The deeploupe GPTBot check does not test Applebot-Extended. Look into your robots.txt yourself to see whether a group for this token exists. Make sure no blanket block with the asterisk also catches Applebot itself, otherwise the site also disappears from Spotlight and Siri. A group with User-agent: Applebot-Extended and a disallow with a single slash is enough to opt out of training.
Related terms
Sources
Terms help you understand. Whether AI crawlers can reach your site is something you measure.
Check your website for freefree · no signup · no credit card