Applebot-Extended
Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt user-agent token Apple introduced in 2024 that lets publishers opt out of having their content used to train Apple's foundation models (Apple Intelligence). It does not crawl pages itself, and disallowing it does not remove your site from Apple search.
Apple runs two web agents with different jobs. Applebot is the crawler behind Spotlight, Siri, and Safari suggestions. Applebot-Extended is not a crawler at all. Apple calls it a secondary user agent, a signal that decides how content already fetched by Applebot may be used. Its one function is training opt-out: disallow it and Apple will not use your pages to train the general-purpose foundation models behind Apple Intelligence, Services, and Developer Tools.
How to set it
Add a block to robots.txt:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /Because Applebot-Extended does not crawl, this rule changes nothing about how your site appears in Apple search. Your pages stay discoverable through Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. Apple introduced the token in June 2024 at WWDC, alongside Apple Intelligence, so publishers could refuse AI training without giving up search visibility.
A separate lever controls a separate surface. The nosnippet meta tag opts a page out of the “broad world knowledge answers” that Siri and Search generate with links back to sources. Apple applies that signal at the page level and says section-level hasPart markup is not supported. So training use, snippet use, and crawling are three independent decisions, each with its own control.
How it affects your traffic
For AI search work, Applebot-Extended is a policy switch, not a ranking lever. Blocking it protects your content from Apple's model training but does nothing for or against how often Apple products surface you, so most sites chasing AI visibility should leave it allowed and use nosnippet selectively instead. The nuance matters: a blanket Disallow copied from another crawler can quietly opt you out of training you meant to keep. Our AI SEO service audits your robots.txt agent by agent so Applebot keeps crawling, your training and snippet choices are deliberate, and your pages stay eligible across Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, and AI Overviews.
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