Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs Bingbot

Applebot-Extended and Bingbot compared on 13 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-14.

Field	Applebot-Extended	Bingbot	Comparison
cites_sources	not documented	yes	different
follows_noarchive	not documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	n/a	yes	different
opt_out_mechanism	not documented	yes	different
publishes_ip_list	no	yes	different
purpose_documented	policy_only	yes	different
reads_llms_txt	not documented	not_documented	different
respects_robots_txt	n/a	yes	different
robots_token_differs_from_ua	yes	not documented	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	no	different
user_agent_string_full	not documented	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	n/a	yes	different
what_it_controls	AI training use of content, not search indexing	not documented	different

Differences

Field	Applebot-Extended statement	Bingbot statement
cites_sources	not documented	Copilot Search in Bing delivers clearly cited sources alongside generative answers to support publishers and content owners.
follows_noarchive	not documented	Bingbot excludes noarchive-tagged content from Copilot and Chat answers and from generative AI training data.
honours_crawl_delay	Apple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.	Microsoft states that a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt always takes precedence over Bing Webmaster Tools crawl control settings for Bingbot.
opt_out_mechanism	not documented	Microsoft lets publishers block Bingbot content from Copilot answers and AI training using noarchive and nocache tags.
publishes_ip_list	Apple publishes no IP list specific to Applebot-Extended and documents one shared crawl identity for Applebot.	Microsoft publishes Bingbot's IP address ranges as a JSON file at bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json for verification purposes.
purpose_documented	Applebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.	Bingbot serves as Microsoft's standard crawler and handles most of Bing's daily web crawling.
reads_llms_txt	not documented	Microsoft does not publish whether Bingbot reads llms.txt files.
respects_robots_txt	Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.	Bingbot honors robots.txt directives and other Microsoft-supported control mechanisms that content owners set for crawling.
robots_token_differs_from_ua	Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token and does not correspond to a separate crawler user agent string.	not documented
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Webpages that disallow Applebot-Extended remain eligible for inclusion in Apple search results.	Microsoft controls Bingbot's use in AI training through meta tags rather than publishing a separate training-specific crawler token.
user_agent_string_full	not documented	Bingbot sends a user agent string containing bingbot/2.0 and a link to Microsoft's bingbot.htm page.
verifiable_by_rdns	Apple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended.	Microsoft verifies Bingbot traffic through reverse DNS lookups that resolve to hostnames ending in search.msn.com.
what_it_controls	Applebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.	not documented

Sources