A summary of the Applebot Internet robot.Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the Applebot robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the Applebot web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 17.58.101.245 - - [28/Apr/2019:21:55:10 +0100] "GET /html-marquee-tag/ HTTP/1.1" 200 8442 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)"
HTTP User Agent
Applebot/0.1
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 17.58.101.245.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 17.0.0.0 – 17.255.255.255 |
| NetName: | APPLE-WWNET |
| OrgName: | Apple Inc. |
| Address: | 20400 Stevens Creek Blvd., City Center Bldg 3 |
| City: | Cupertino |
| StateProv: | CA |
| PostalCode: | 95014 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2017-07-08 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Apple Inc.
Owner
Apple Inc.
Country
USA
Verification
The Apple website confirms example uses of their robot user-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)
The IP address used is confirmed as from within the 17.0.0.0 net block.
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://www.apple.com/go/applebot.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text.
The Applebot website provides details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1
Details are given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent Applebot from visiting your site
User-agent: Applebot Disallow: /
Details and example are not given for controlling the frequency of Applebot visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests. You may wish to try adding the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Applebot Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
The AppleBot is a crawler used by Apple in support of their products, such as Siri and Spotlight suggestions.
