Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs Googlebot

Applebot-Extended and Googlebot compared on 12 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	Applebot-Extended	Googlebot	Comparison
cites_sources	not documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	n/a	no	different
observed_verified_request_ratio_census	not documented	0.991	different
publishes_ip_list	no	yes	different
purpose_documented	policy_only	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not documented	no	different
respects_robots_txt	n/a	yes	different
robots_token_differs_from_ua	yes	not documented	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	yes	same
user_agent_string_full	not documented	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)	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	Googlebot statement
cites_sources	not documented	Google AI Overviews and AI Mode return AI generated responses with links to supporting websites.
honours_crawl_delay	Apple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.	Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for Googlebot.
observed_verified_request_ratio_census	not documented	Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z.
publishes_ip_list	Apple publishes no IP list specific to Applebot-Extended and documents one shared crawl identity for Applebot.	Google publishes the IP address ranges used by Googlebot at https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json.
purpose_documented	Applebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.	Googlebot crawls pages for Google Search, Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover.
reads_llms_txt	not documented	Google Search does not use llms.txt files.
respects_robots_txt	Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.	Googlebot obeys robots.txt rules when crawling automatically.
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
user_agent_string_full	not documented	Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html).
verifiable_by_rdns	Apple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended.	Googlebot requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com.
what_it_controls	Applebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.	not documented

Sources