What Is Applebot?
Applebot is Apple’s web crawler used to index and gather information from websites across the internet. It plays a key role in enhancing various features within Apple’s ecosystem, including Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Applebot helps ensure that relevant information is accessible to users of these products by indexing web pages.
Function and Purpose
Applebot is tasked with accessing and processing various types of web resources. It is instrumental in collecting data from:
- Robots.txt Files: Directives specifying which parts of a website can or cannot be crawled.
- Sitemaps: Files that list the URLs of a website to help crawlers find and index content more effectively.
- RSS Feeds: Feeds that provide updates and new content from websites.
- HTML: The fundamental code that structures web pages.
- JavaScript and Ajax Requests: Dynamic content and scripts enhancing user experience.
- Images and Other Media: Visual and multimedia elements of web pages.
Identifying Applebot
To identify Applebot traffic, webmasters can use reverse DNS Lookups to verify if an IP address resolves to a domain in the *.applebot.apple.com range. You can also use IP Address Matching to compare IP addresses to a CIDR prefix list provided by Apple.
Customising robots.txt Rules
Applebot follows robots.txt directives for controlling access to web content. You can configure robots.txt to manage which sections of your site are accessible to Applebot.
Meta Tags For Indexing Control
You can use meta tags to influence how Applebot indexes and displays your pages. Common directives include noindex, nosnippet, nofollow, none, and all. These help you prevent indexing the page, generating a page description, following links on the page, combines these, or allows indexing, snippet generation, and link following.
Applebot Extended
Applebot-Extended is a secondary user agent that offers additional control over how content is used for training Apple’s AI models. Web publishers can disallow Applebot-Extended to prevent their content from being used in AI and ML training.
About Search Rankings
Apple Search evaluates factors such as user engagement, content relevance, and webpage design when ranking search results. These factors help determine the importance of search results. Understanding Applebot’s role and configuration options helps manage how your website content is indexed, utilised, and used.