# Applebot-Extended vs ChatGPT-User

Applebot-Extended and ChatGPT-User compared on 11 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

| Field | Applebot-Extended | ChatGPT-User | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not documented | not_documented | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | n/a | not_documented | different |
| publishes_ip_list | no | yes | different |
| purpose_documented | policy_only | user_fetch | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not documented | not_documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | n/a | partial | different |
| robots_token_differs_from_ua | yes | not documented | different |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | not_documented | different |
| user_agent_string_full | not documented | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | n/a | not_documented | different |
| what_it_controls | AI training use of content, not search indexing | not documented | different |

## Differences

| Field | Applebot-Extended statement | ChatGPT-User statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not documented | OpenAI does not publish whether ChatGPT responses cite pages fetched by ChatGPT-User. |
| honours_crawl_delay | Apple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended. | OpenAI does not publish whether ChatGPT-User honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive. |
| publishes_ip_list | Apple publishes no IP list specific to Applebot-Extended and documents one shared crawl identity for Applebot. | OpenAI publishes the IP address ranges used by ChatGPT-User as a JSON file at https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json. |
| purpose_documented | Applebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models. | ChatGPT-User visits web pages for user actions in ChatGPT and in Custom GPTs. |
| reads_llms_txt | not documented | OpenAI does not publish whether ChatGPT-User reads llms.txt files. |
| respects_robots_txt | Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training. | ChatGPT-User fetches pages in response to user actions in ChatGPT, and OpenAI states that robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User fetches. |
| 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. | OpenAI does not document ChatGPT-User as a search or training opt-out token. |
| user_agent_string_full | not documented | ChatGPT-User sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot. |
| verifiable_by_rdns | Apple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended. | OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for ChatGPT-User. |
| what_it_controls | Applebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing. | not documented |

## Sources

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://openai.com/chatgpt-user.json
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829