# Applebot-Extended vs GoogleOther

Applebot-Extended and GoogleOther compared on 11 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | Applebot-Extended | GoogleOther | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| honours_crawl_delay | n/a | no | different |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | not documented | no | different |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | not documented | yes | different |
| publishes_ip_list | no | yes | different |
| purpose_documented | policy_only | mixed | different |
| respects_robots_txt | n/a | yes | different |
| robots_token_differs_from_ua | yes | not documented | different |
| robots_txt_token | not documented | GoogleOther | different |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | not_documented | 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 | GoogleOther statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 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 GoogleOther. |
| observed_fetches_robots_txt | not documented | GoogleOther made 93 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z and fetched /robots.txt on none of those requests. GoogleOther's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail was the home page at 2026-09-14T12:03:30Z. |
| observed_requested_mcp_endpoint | not documented | GoogleOther requested the /mcp endpoint of Rattlesnakes By Mail twice between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, at 2026-09-14T15:07:30Z and at 2026-09-14T18:27:49Z. Rattlesnakes By Mail returned status 405 to both GoogleOther requests for /mcp. |
| 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 GoogleOther 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. | GoogleOther is a generic crawler that Google product teams use to fetch publicly accessible content from sites. |
| respects_robots_txt | Applebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training. | GoogleOther 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 |
| robots_txt_token | not documented | The robots.txt token for GoogleOther is GoogleOther. |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | Webpages that disallow Applebot-Extended remain eligible for inclusion in Apple search results. | Google does not document whether content fetched by GoogleOther is used for Gemini training. |
| verifiable_by_rdns | Apple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended. | GoogleOther 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

- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googleother
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829