Rattlesnakes By Mail

Applebot-Extended vs GPTBot

Applebot-Extended and GPTBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 16 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

FieldApplebot-ExtendedGPTBotComparison
honours_crawl_delayn/anot_documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listnoyesdifferent
purpose_documentedpolicy_onlytrainingdifferent
respects_robots_txtn/ayesdifferent
robots_token_differs_from_uayesnot documenteddifferent
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedyesdifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensyesyessame
user_agent_string_fullnot documentedMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotdifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsn/anot_documenteddifferent
what_it_controlsAI training use of content, not search indexingnot documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldApplebot-Extended statementGPTBot statement
honours_crawl_delayApple does not publish a Crawl-delay behaviour for Applebot-Extended.OpenAI does not publish whether GPTBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
publishes_ip_listApple publishes no IP list specific to Applebot-Extended and documents one shared crawl identity for Applebot.OpenAI publishes the IP address ranges used by GPTBot as a JSON file at https://openai.com/gptbot.json.
purpose_documentedApplebot-Extended controls whether website content is used to train Apple general purpose foundation models.GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.
respects_robots_txtApplebot-Extended is a robots.txt token that publishers disallow to opt out of generative model training.GPTBot honours robots.txt rules that webmasters set for the GPTBot token.
robots_token_differs_from_uaApplebot-Extended is a robots.txt control token and does not correspond to a separate crawler user agent string.not documented
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedOpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.
user_agent_string_fullnot documentedGPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.
verifiable_by_rdnsApple does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method specific to Applebot-Extended.OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for GPTBot.
what_it_controlsApplebot-Extended controls the AI training use of crawled content and does not control search indexing.not documented

Sources